Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk said the company will be one of the first companies to make artificial general intelligence and “probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form,” as he remains confident in the AI future.
AGI is roughly defined as a hypothetical kind of AI that can understand, learn, and perform essentially any intellectual task a human can, at roughly human level or beyond. That advanced humanoid robot concept would appear to be a generation or two beyond what Tesla (TSLA) is anticipated to reveal with Optimus Gen 3, which is anticipated to be a humanoid robot designed to perform industrial and household tasks using Tesla’s (TSLA) full self-driving–style AI stack.
Earlier this year, Tesla said it plans to announce Optimus Gen 3 in the first quarter of 2026, describing it as the first version designed for mass manufacturing rather than demo.
Morgan Stanley expects that Optimus Gen 3 will largely be contained to Tesla (TSLA) factories this year, where it can collect critical real-world data to train its models and trial novel hardware designs in a controlled, lower-risk environment. “Given that it would be over two years since the last major, full-body Optimus update and the numerous pivots the company has made… we would not be surprised if Gen 3 is a substantial departure from the current version,” updated analyst Adam Jonas. He thinks Optimus Gen 3 could actually be simpler than expected.
Elon Musk has suggested that Optimus Gen 3 could scale rather quickly to roughly 1M units per year.
Shares of Tesla (TSLA) were down 0.8% in premarket trading on Thursday to $402.80.