Tesla is putting a lot of effort into encouraging its shareholders to make their voices heard at the 2024 Annual Stockholders’ Meeting, also known as the 2024 Cyber Roundup. Highlighting the electric vehicle maker’s efforts is a recent voting guide that was posted on social media platform X, which happens to feature the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus.
While the post reiterates a message to shareholders that Tesla has been highlighting for the past few weeks, the article on X stood out because of the images that the company used. This was because instead of a person demonstrating each voting option, it was Optimus showing users of the social media platform how they can vote for the proposals at the 2024 Cyber Roundup.
— Tesla (@Tesla) May 31, 2024
This means that Optimus was photographed performing human tasks, such as typing on a keyboard, using a mouse, holding a smartphone carefully, holding a paper envelope, “talking” on the phone, and writing on a piece of paper, among other activities. The images are quite impressive as they show Optimus’s hands seemingly performing very humanlike tasks.
In true Tesla fashion, the Optimus unit that was featured in the voting guide was real, not computer-generated. Tesla Senior Staff Software Engineer for the Optimus program Julian Ibarz confirmed as much in a post on X when he noted, “I have to say it again, but the robot is not CGI in those pictures, for real.” The Tesla Optimus Engineer’s comments caught the interest of many, particularly with regards to an update that Elon Musk announced for the humanoid robot’s hands.
In a post on X earlier this month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk noted that Optimus’ hands will be upgraded to have 22 degrees of freedom (DoF) later this year. Such an upgrade would be substantial, considering that human hands have 27 degrees of freedom. With 22 DoF, Optimus will have the potential to perform tasks with nearly the same proficiency as a human being, likely making the humanoid robot useful in tasks such as vehicle or battery production.
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