‘Growing up fast’: Tesla's Optimus can do more than ‘just dancing’; is learning from third-party internet videos

Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus is rapidly evolving. Its latest video drop may be the clearest sign yet of where the future is headed. In a recent video posted on its X account Wednesday, Optimus is seen performing an array of everyday household chores with surprising dexterity including stirring a pot, cleaning a table, vacuuming the floor, tearing paper towels, and dumping trash, all prompted by natural language instructions.

"I’m not just dancing all day, ok," Optimus wrote in a post on X.

The tasks, though mundane, are executed by a single neural network—a leap in general-purpose robotics, which Tesla claims was directly trained using human videos.

Optimus is a bi-pedal, autonomous robot capable of performing unsafe, repetitive, or boring tasks be it at home, or in factories, and beyond.

The video marks a shift from the dancing demo released by Tesla on May 14, which had sparked scepticism and CGI allegations. In response, Elon Musk assured viewers that the robot performed these actions regularly at Tesla’s Palo Alto lab, roaming offices autonomously, charging itself as needed. Tesla Optimus’ X account followed up with a playful quip saying, “growing up fast.”

The new clip, some of it played at double speed, suggests Optimus is still catching up to human pace, but the breadth of its skill set is growing. According to Milan Kovac, VP of Optimus (Tesla Bot), Tesla has achieved a “significant breakthrough” in transferring learning from human video demonstrations to the bot’s behaviour, reducing reliance on labour-intensive teleoperation data. The goal now is to expand the learning pipeline to include third-person internet videos and improve performance via reinforcement learning in both physical and synthetic environments.

“One of our goals is to have Optimus learn straight from internet videos of humans doing tasks,” Kovac added in his post.

The robot’s ability to multitask and adapt to natural language instructions marks a significant milestone in general AI applications. “We’re training a single neural net to do all these tasks, and many new skills are emerging,” said Kovac, adding that Tesla is aggressively hiring for AI roles to accelerate development.

Musk, who called Optimus “the biggest product ever” in his reply to the recent video, reiterated in a CNBC interview on Tuesday that Tesla plans to deploy thousands of Optimus units in its factories by this fall. “We expect to scale Optimus faster than any product in history,” Musk said, aiming for one million units annually by as early as 2029. “Everyone’s going to want one.”

In a brief exchange with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk emphasised that robotic systems, whether robotaxis or humanoid bots, must be grounded in real-world functionality.

If the latest video is any indication, that future might arrive sooner than expected.