Elon Musk: Tesla Could Build AGI Through Its Optimus Robot

Could Elon Musk be betting Tesla’s future on artificial general intelligence? Well, that’s what his recent claim suggests.

On March 4, the Tesla CEO announced in an X post that “Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form,” a reference to Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot program. 

Statements like this seem to position Tesla as a serious contender in the most consequential AI race of the century.

A bold vision with real investment behind it

Musk’s AGI claim isn’t a new idea. If this sounds like something he has said before, that’s because he has made a close version of this claim.

In 2023, he said that Tesla cars now had “a mind” of their own and that the company had cracked “some aspects of AGI.” It is also on record that he predicted AGI arriving in 2025. Also, early this year, he proclaimed on X: “We have entered the Singularity,” and that “2026 is the year of the Singularity.”

While these claims attract scrutiny, they have so far been backed by meaningful corporate commitment.

For example, Optimus, the vehicle through which Musk makes the AGI case, has been pitched as a potential $30 trillion annual revenue opportunity, with Musk claiming it will produce robot surgeons that outperform humans within three years.

Tesla even converted its Fremont factory lines to Optimus Gen 3 production, which clearly shows the company’s financial commitment.

A track record that invites questions

Musk’s vision does come with a similar pattern of missed deadlines.

It can be seen with the promises he made about Tesla’s self-driving. He predicted all Tesla vehicles would be shipped with full self-driving autonomy hardware each year from 2019 through 2025. As of today, Tesla’s Austin Robotaxi service runs about 30 cars, with most of them not in regular use, and it still has safety monitors in the driver’s seat.

Musk made another prediction in July 2025, stating that by the end of the year, Tesla would offer autonomous ride-hailing covering “half the US population.” But this didn’t happen. Even Tesla’s Master Plan Part IV, released last September, has not yet materialised.

Interestingly, Musk also predicted that thousands of Optimus units would be working at Tesla factories by the end of 2025, but there is no evidence of that. While Optimus carries the AGI narrative, as of today, there is no agreed-upon definition of AGI or when it will emerge.

Critics, however, point out that the repeated missed milestones could rub investors the wrong way and erode public confidence, particularly as it coincided with the same week the company recorded its second consecutive sales decline (down 11% year-over-year) and its first-ever annual drop in revenue, with earnings per share falling by 46%, as reported by TechCrunch.

Despite the skepticism, Tesla’s AI ambitions are not purely speculative.

The company operates one of the world’s largest real-world AI data pipelines through its fleet of vehicles, collecting billions of miles of driving data used to train its neural networks. Tesla has also invested heavily in AI infrastructure, including its custom Dojo supercomputer and large-scale GPU clusters designed to accelerate machine learning training.

Supporters argue that this combination of real-world data, vertical integration, and robotics research could give Tesla an unconventional but potentially powerful path toward advanced AI systems.

Also read: xAI’s $20 billion funding round highlights how quickly Musk is scaling his AI ambitions.