Musk shows Optimus folding clothes — with the admission it wasn't autonomous
From the Robots digest for Oct 28, 2026
Thread: robots — Tesla Optimus: production starts, on-brand hype gap · continuing
What happened: Coverage carried by MSN (published October 28, ~12:56 PM ET) re-sets Elon Musk's Optimus folding-clothes demonstration beside his admission that the robot was not operating autonomously while doing it, and compares the clip with Figure AI — the OpenAI-, Nvidia-, Microsoft- and Jeff Bezos-backed startup — demonstrating a humanoid responding to spoken instructions.
What's genuinely new: The non-autonomy admission attached to a specific household-task demo — a one-line statement of the demo-versus-capability gap in Tesla's humanoid story, landing days after the company said initial Optimus mass production had begun at Fremont and put outside customer deliveries around late 2027.
Watch: Whether Tesla shows an autonomous version of the folding-clothes task, and how the demo-gap framing weighs on the late-2027 outside-customer timeline.
Sources MSN