There are now at least five Optimus robot prototypes built and capable of walking, using motors, controllers and electronics all designed and manufactured by Tesla. The general-purpose robot is learning to sense the world around it, map it and navigate it using systems developed for the self-driving Autopilot systems in the company's electric cars.

"As Full Self Driving gets closer to generalized real-world AI, that same software is transferable to a humanoid robot" said Musk. "Humans can obviously walk around with our arms and legs, but we can also drive a car, fly a plane, steer a boat, ride a horse. If you have a generalized understanding, a generalized real-world AI, which is what we are developing for Full Self Driving, it can be transferred to basically anything. Optimus will use the same FSD computer as the car."

"Very few people, even in the AI community, appreciate just how much capability Tesla has in AI," he added. "It's by far the most advanced real-world AI. There's no-one even close. Reality has the most degrees of freedom."

The video shows a quick look at some sort of leg design, demonstrating both a degree of explosive leaping power from the electric actuators, and also how sensitive the system can be, with a rubber foot coming down on an egg, but stopping before breaking it.

It also shows a few glimpses of the Optimus team training the robot, using a similar monkey see, monkey do technique as the Sanctuary AI team we featured yesterday – but apparently minus the telepresence component. Operators wearing motion tracking suits and head-mounted cameras perform the kinds of basic tasks Tesla hopes to train the bots for, and their actions are replicated by a virtual model of the robot, which learns common movement patterns.