Tesla Optimus has demonstrated its latest capabilities as progress on the project continues to accelerate towards the ultimate goal of mass production in the coming years.
Tesla is still developing Optimus and preparing for the early stages of mass production, where units will be sold and shipped to customers. CEO Elon Musk has always marketed the humanoid robot as the biggest product in history, even outside of Tesla, but ever.
He believes it will eliminate the need to manually perform monotonous tasks, such as cleaning, mowing the lawn and folding clothes.
However, Musk recently revealed bigger plans for Optimus, including the ability to completely relieve humans of work for the next 20 years.
JUST IN: Elon Musk says work will be ‘optional’ in less than 20 years due to artificial intelligence and robotics. pic.twitter.com/l3S5kl5HBB
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) November 30, 2025
Development has progressed across Tesla’s AI and robotics teams, and a new video has been shown of the robot doing a light jog in what appears to be a very natural form:
Just set a new PR in the lab pic.twitter.com/8kJ2om7uV7
— Tesla Optimus (@Tesla_Optimus) December 2, 2025
Optimus has also made several public appearances recently, including an appearance at the Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, conference. Some spectators shared videos of Optimus’ charging tool, in addition to his movements and capabilities, most notably the hand:
Gotta hand it to Elon 🤟 pic.twitter.com/fZKDlmGAbe
– Rick Burton · NeurIPS 2025 (@_ricburton) December 2, 2025
The hand, forearm, and fingers have been some of the most glaring challenges Tesla has faced recently, especially as it continues to work on iteration of the third-generation Optimus.
Musk said during the third quarter earnings call:
“I don’t want to downplay how difficult it is, but it’s very difficult, especially creating a hand as dexterous and capable as the human hand, which is incredible. The human hand is an incredible thing. The more I study the human hand, the more I realize it’s incredible, and why you need four fingers and a thumb, and why fingers have certain degrees of freedom, and why different muscles are of different strength, and fingers are of different lengths. It turns out that all of this is there for a reason.”
The interesting part of the Optimus program so far is the fact that Tesla has made a lot of progress in other parts of the project, like locomotion, for example, which seems to have come a long way.
However, without a functional hand and fingers, Optimus could be rendered relatively useless, so he obviously has to figure out this crucial part first.
