On Tesla’s earnings call Wednesday, CEO Elon Musk announced that the company had begun early production of its humanoid robot on its high-volume line in Fremont, California. Then he laid out what still needs work: the robot’s hands, its safety, reliability, and durability, and the artificial intelligence needed to make it a productive tool.

Tesla is manufacturing humanoid robots while still working out how to make them useful, reliable, and durable enough for customers.

“There’s still quite a lot of work to do with regard to the AI and the robot for it to be truly useful for open-ended tasks,” Musk said.

“At some point, there will be more humanoid robots on Earth than there are humans.”

— ELON MUSK These are substantial caveats for a product slated for volume production. Musk expects the pieces to come together around the end of 2027, when Tesla could begin delivering Optimus to outside companies, but didn’t say which or what exactly the robots would do for them. In the meantime, Tesla needs to build a fleet of robots that can practice tasks and generate training data, then feed what they learn back into the system. It also needs to integrate a new chip that Musk says will give the robots far more computing power.

Tesla called the machines coming off the Fremont line its first “production-quality bots” and said its manufacturing process was suitable for a commercial product. But the company did not disclose how many robots it has produced, what tasks they can currently perform autonomously, or how often they can complete the tasks without human intervention. The announcement marks a step toward manufacturing Optimus at scale, not evidence that Tesla has a robot ready to do even the initial jobs Musk envisions — dangerous, repetitive industrial work performed around the clock — let alone become the general-purpose household machine he ultimately imagines.

“You can produce them, but the software is lacking,” Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told *The Verge*. “If you have a lot of hardware without the software, I think that’s a big problem.”

Musk himself spent much of his discussion of Optimus explaining why investors shouldn’t expect finished robots to immediately pour out of the factory. Production will follow an S-curve, he said, with a slow, bumpy beginning. “There’s like 10,000 things that have to go right for production of the robot,” Musk said, “and it will move as fast as the slowest.”

Most of the equipment for a line intended to produce a million robots annually is already in Fremont, according to Musk. But reaching a rate of 20,000 robots a week will take “at least a year, maybe a little longer,” he said.

“There’s still parts of the design that are changing,” Musk said. “You’ve got to basically build up an entire gigantic global supply chain and have domestically a very, very big factory, and everything has got to work.”

“If you have a lot of hardware without the software, I think that’s a big problem.”

— KEN GOLDBERG Those production challenges are only one part of the unfinished work.

A robot that can repeatedly perform a carefully defined task has a different job from a general-purpose humanoid expected to adapt to varied objects and surroundings. Musk described industrial applications as the first market for Optimus, with at-home purchases coming as the robot develops a much wider range of capabilities.

Optimus is “going to do like 1,000 times more things than a car would do,” Musk said.

Some of Goldberg’s more pessimistic colleagues think a truly useful humanoid robot is still 25 years away, he said. Goldberg believes the field will solve its hardest problems — including reliability, speed, and dexterity — sooner than that. But even he doesn’t expect them to be solved on Musk’s timeline.