During a town hall event last week, Tesla (TSLA) informed its employees about its plans to begin collecting data to train its Optimus humanoid robots at its manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, The Business Insider reported on Saturday.
The company issued a February timeline to start training Optimus on how to operate in the Texas Gigafactory. The vehicle manufacturer has been conducting data collection and training sessions for Optimus prototypes at its Fremont, California, site for over a year.
There, data collectors for Optimus are kept separate from other factory workers to avoid any disruption to manufacturing output, according to people familiar with the program.
Optimus, first announced in 2021, has been touted by Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk as the “biggest product of all time.” This week, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the billionaire investor said Tesla (TSLA) is expected to begin selling Optimus robots to the public by the end of 2027.
“By the end of next year, I think we’ll be selling humanoid robots to the public,” he said, adding, “By the end of this year, I think they will be doing more complex tasks but still deployed in an industrial environment.“