Tesla Optimus shows off its newest capability as progress accelerates

Tesla Optimus showed off its newest capability as progress on the project continues to accelerate toward an ultimate goal of mass production in the coming years.

Tesla is still developing Optimus and preparing for the first stages of mass production, where units would 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 of all time.

He believes it will eliminate the need to manually perform monotonous tasks, like cleaning, mowing the lawn, and folding laundry.

However, lately, Musk has revealed even bigger plans for Optimus, including the ability to relieve humans of work entirely within the next 20 years.

JUST IN: Elon Musk says working will be ‘optional’ in less than 20 years because of AI and robotics. pic.twitter.com/l3S5kl5HBB

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) November 30, 2025

Development at Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence and Robotics teams has progressed, and a new video was shown of the robot taking a light jog with what appeared to be some pretty 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 lately, including one at the Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS Conference. Some spectators shared videos of Optimus’s charging rig, as well as its movements and capabilities, most interestingly, the hand:

You have to hand it to Elon pic.twitter.com/fZKDlmGAbe

— Ric Burton · NeurIPS 2025 (@_ricburton) December 2, 2025

The hand, forearm, and fingers have been one of the most evident challenges for Tesla in recent times, especially as it continues to work on its 3rd Generation iteration of Optimus.

Musk said during the Q3 Earnings Call:

“I don’t want to downplay the difficulty, but it’s an incredibly difficult thing, especially to create a hand that is as dexterous and capable as the human hand, which is incredible. The human hand is an incredible thing. The more you study the human hand, the more incredible you realize it is, and why you need four fingers and a thumb, why the fingers have certain degrees of freedom, why the various muscles are of different strengths, and fingers are of different lengths. It turns out that those are all there for a reason.”

The interesting part of the Optimus program so far is the fact that Tesla has made a lot of progress with other portions of the project, like movement, for example, which appears to have come a long way.

However, without a functional hand and fingers, Optimus could be rendered relatively useless, so it is evident that it has to figure this crucial part out first.

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