Optimus Gen 3 hands
Tesla’s Optimus Gen 3 reportedly doubles Gen 2 hand dexterity with 22 degrees of freedom and packs 50 actuators plus tactile pressure sensors — a big step toward human‑like manipulation. The same podcast thread says Brad Agrawal is backing Hark AI with $100 million and first commercial models are targeted by summer 2026 (youtube.com).
Tesla’s latest hand design shifts the bulk of the motors into the forearm and uses tendon-driven linkages so the fingers themselves remain slim and closer to a human form. (getrobothub.com)) Elon Musk posted footage of the new hands on X in mid‑February and Tesla China posted a close‑up teaser in March, both showing the updated hardware in short lab clips. (basenor.com)) Internal demos shown to employees reportedly used teleoperation to validate coordinated tasks such as catching and passing, with an engineer posting a detailed write‑up of the teleoperated catch routine. (mikekalil.com)) Several analyst write‑ups and Tesla‑adjacent trackers note that “Gen 3” has been described publicly as a hands‑focused upgrade rather than a wholesale new body platform. (blog.robozaps.com)) Elon Musk told the Abundance Summit in March that Tesla aims to begin production of the Gen‑3 hands this summer, a timeline repeated in company‑focused reporting. (teslarati.com)) The Hark story in the podcast thread appears to misname the backer: Hark was launched and publicly detailed on March 24, 2026 by Figure AI founder Brett Adcock, who the company says provided a $100 million personal fund to start the lab. (businesswire.com)) Hark has hired former Apple industrial designer Abidur Chowdhury and assembled a compact research and design team, and told TechCrunch it expects to ship its first models this summer. (bloomberg.com)) Reporting on Hark’s infrastructure says the startup has acquired large Nvidia B200 GPU capacity and is pursuing an integrated model‑plus‑hardware approach, positioning its initial releases around multimodal, persistent‑memory systems. (aihola.com))
