It’s well-known that Elon Musk is looking to automate physical work with Tesla’s Optimus robots, but there are plans in the offing for automating digital work as well.
In a recent podcast appearance, Sulaiman Ghori, an engineer at xAI, revealed details about an ambitious project that mirrors Tesla’s physical robotics work but operates entirely in the digital realm. Speaking openly about what the company is building, Ghori outlined a vision for AI agents that could perform any task a human does on a computer—without requiring any changes to existing software infrastructure.
“The basic concept is very simple,” Ghori explained. “With Optimus you are taking any physical task a human can do and allowing a robot to do it automatically at a fraction of the cost with 24/7 uptime. We’re doing the same with anything that a human does digitally.”
The approach Ghori described is surprisingly straightforward in principle. “Anything where they need to digitally input keyboard and mouse inputs, which is usually what humans do, and look at a screen back and make decisions, we just emulate what the human is doing directly,” he said. “So no adoption from any software is required at all. We can deploy in any situation in which a human is potentially currently.”
What makes this particularly noteworthy is the infrastructure advantage xAI appears to have. When asked about rollout plans, Ghori noted that while specific details haven’t been made public, “it’ll be slowly at first and then very quickly.” He emphasized a crucial scaling advantage: “The difference for us, given that infrastructure buildout already has happened. We can go on the Tesla network (which consists of the computing power of idle Tesla cars) or we can build out our data center of Tesla computers. The difference for us from going from 1,000 human emulators to a million is actually not very big. It’s not the biggest part of the challenge.”
Interestingly, days after this podcast was released on YouTube, Sulaiman Ghori announced on X that he was leaving xAI. “I have left xAI Nothing but love to my former team and coworkers!” he posted on X. Several people speculated that it was because of his comments on the podcast.
Regardless, the implications of xAI’s human emulator technology are significant. Unlike many AI integrations that require companies to rebuild their workflows or adopt new platforms, these “human emulators” could theoretically slot into existing digital infrastructure seamlessly, interacting with software exactly as a human would through standard interfaces. This positions xAI’s approach as potentially more immediately deployable than solutions requiring API integrations or custom software development. The ability to scale rapidly from thousands to millions of agents, leveraging existing computational infrastructure from Tesla, suggests that once the technology is proven, widespread adoption could happen remarkably quickly. Anthropic has already released Claude Cowork, which looks to automate knowledge work tasks, and with xAI also working on similar lines, it appears that white-collar jobs beyond coding could be automated much faster than most people anticipated.