Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot Debuts at World Robot Conference, Doesn’t Do Any Robot Things

The World Robot Conference in Beijing was a show floor of wonder last week. Humanoid Chinese robots played the zither, folded laundry, and bested humans at the board game Go. As these modern miracles unfolded, Tesla’s Optimus robot looked on, unmoving, from inside a glass box.

The conference took place in Beijing and ran from August 21st to the 25th. Attendees were a who’s who of Chinese robotic developers and some were on hand to show off a vision of the future where humanoid machines do humanities manual labor.

The Astribot S1 was there performing Chinese martial arts and writing calligraphy with a brush. The Galbot and Turui robots proved their worth by bagging groceries and moving soda cans around some shelves. Another company, Agribo, promised it would begin delivering some of its machines to customers this October.

While these machines puttered around, Tesla’s Optimus stared at them from a glass cage surrounded by the company’s electric vehicles. Optimus is a sleek looking humanoid robot but it hasn’t done well in its product demos.

Elon Musk famously unveiled Tesla’s venture into robotics in the summer of 2021 by promising the company would soon put humanoid robots in people’s homes. During the presentation, a stiff looking machine walked on stage with Musk. It turned out it was just a guy in a suit. In a video Musk posted to X showing Optimus folding laundry, someone is just off camera operating the machine remotely.

The video had a big impact on the marketing of other robots and it’s typical for other companies to add a “no teleoperation” label to their videos. The people making robots want people to know that the robots are moving independently. There’s not much use to a slow moving laundry folding robot if you have to operate it yourself from the sidelines.

According to CNBC, China has invested more than $14 billion into the robotics industry over the last decade. Twenty-seven new robots made their debuts at the conference while Optimus looked on from his glass cage. Musk claimed that Optimus would roll into Tesla factories by the end of the year.

“Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026,” he wrote in a post on X. The hype around robots is big but it remains to be seen whether the cost of the production will outweigh the benefits in the reduction of labor cost, let alone if Tesla can ship one.