Elon Musk wants to take humanoid robots mainstream with Optimus. Making them ‘the biggest product ever’ will be tough.

• Tesla plans to unleash a new generation of humanoid robots.
• Elon Musk revealed upgraded versions of Optimus at Tesla’s Robotaxi Day.
• Musk said they would be “the biggest product ever of any kind,” but it’s unclear how they will stand out from rivals.

Elon Musk has a long history of hype. Tesla’s Cybertruck, he has claimed, is from Star Wars, a comment echoed by Musk on Thursday.

Startups have been getting in on the action, too. Robotics startup Figure, founded in 2022 and now worth $2.6 billion, used Nvidia technology to develop the newest version of its humanoid robot, which it revealed in August. Meanwhile, in April, Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics launched a new version of its robot named Atlas. It said the robot was “designed for real-world applications.”

Before these new iterations were revealed, industry watchers were already predicting explosive growth in the humanoid robotics market. A February report by Goldman Sachs suggested the total addressable market could hit $38 billion by 2035, up from its previous $6 billion projection.

It is unclear how Musk’s Optimus robots will stand out in this fast-growing market and become “the biggest product ever of any kind.”

Paul Miller, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, told Business Insider that while people love “geeking out” about robots that walk,” compelling use cases for them are less obvious.

“These robots have a wow factor, but they may not have the best form factor for addressing industry’s dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks,” he said. “We should all focus more on the task we’re trying to complete and less on how cool the robots look.”

Making further improvements to humanoid robots is a tough technical challenge. Earlier this year, Jim Fan, one of Nvidia’s top AI and robotics researchers, wrote on X that the “data recipe is way more complex for robotics than ChatGPT,” with advances in models underlying humanoid robots depending on a mix of “internet data, simulation data, and real robot data.”

Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management felt the Optimus project is “more advanced” than he expected, moving from “a prototype to the pilot phase,” but acknowledged that the units displayed on Thursday still felt more robot than human.

So, while Musk might have staked himself in a new technological battle taking shape in robotics, it seems he has some work to do if he’s serious about making Optimus bigger than anything he’s ever done.