TL;DR: Tesla’s robotics lead just casually dropped that Optimus Gen 3 is the version designed specifically for mass production during an ETH Zurich keynote.
Konstantinos Laskaris, the guy running Tesla’s Optimus program, rolled into ETH Zurich earlier this month and dropped some serious news. He wasn’t just showing off another prototype to the 400 robotics nerds in the room. He revealed that Optimus Gen 3 is officially the “mass manufacturable” version.
We’ve seen the Gen 2 walking around and handling eggs. But Gen 3? This is the one Tesla actually plans to scale. Laskaris walked the crowd through the hardware upgrades and laid out exactly how they intend to push these things off an assembly line rather than hand-building them in a lab.
It makes total sense when you think about it. Tesla has always treated manufacturing as the actual product. Getting a robot to walk is a neat trick. Pumping out millions of them at a cost that makes sense? That’s where the real game is played. And it looks like Tesla thinks they finally have the hardware locked in to do exactly that.