Tesla’s push into humanoid robotics faces a vastly steeper technical climb than its self-driving ambitions, according to Ark Invest chief executive Cathie Wood.
Speaking in a new CNBC interview, Wood says Ark’s internal analysis suggests that building Tesla’s Optimus robot to function reliably in the real world is orders of magnitude more complex than deploying autonomous vehicles.
Wood says Ark’s conclusion is based on work by the firm’s research team, including chief futurist Brett Winton, who has been analyzing the technical requirements behind humanoid robotics alongside other senior researchers.
“An Optimus robot is going to be 200,000 times more difficult to get working correctly relative to a Robotaxi. So you’ll have waves of Optimus improving with time. But full human-level is going to be quite difficult.”
Wood says she sees humanoid robotics as a long-duration project rather than a near-term breakthrough, noting that progress is likely to arrive in incremental stages rather than a single leap to human-level capability.
Wood says early forms of robotics are already showing practical value in narrower, controlled tasks, even as broader general-purpose humanoid functionality remains elusive.
“Nonetheless, the robots that we’re seeing, pick-and-pack and lifting things, they’re starting to make waves.”
In November, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Optimus is still in the early stages of development, but could witness a rapid unlock in skill acquisition and general intelligence once it learns through self-play.
“Then, where I think it gets very interesting and very much like humans is that you want the robot to self-play. So you say, how does a child learn? Well, a child has toys. And a child plays with the toys, plays with the blocks, at some point figures out how to put the triangle in the triangle hole and the circle in the circle hole by doing it over and over again.”
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