Image: Tesla
Tesla’s head of Optimus AI, Ashish Kumar, has announced his departure from the company to join Meta as a research scientist. Kumar, who joined Tesla in July 2023, spent just over two years leading AI development efforts for the humanoid robot program before making the move.
“Decided to leave Tesla. It’s been an incredible ride leading the Optimus AI team,” Kumar wrote in a Thursday post on X. “We went all-in on scalable methods — swapping the classical stack with reinforcement learning & scaling dexterity by learning from videos. AI is the most significant bit to unlock humanoids.”
Optimus is one of Tesla’s most ambitious products and plays a central role in the company’s recently unveiled Master Plan Part 4, which outlines its vision of achieving “sustainable abundance” by scaling AI technologies such as robotics and autonomy. CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly described Optimus as one of Tesla’s most important products, going as far as to say it could ultimately represent more value than the company’s vehicle business. Back in July, Musk confirmed that Optimus V3 — the latest version of Tesla’s humanoid robot — is ready for volume production.
In a follow-up comment on X, Kumar noted that his move wasn’t motivated by financial incentives. “Financial upside at Tesla was significantly larger. Tesla is known to compensate pretty well, way before Zuck made it cool. If I wanted to optimize for money, I would have stayed at Tesla,” he said.
Meta, meanwhile, has been ramping up its recruitment of top AI talent as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s push to build a “superintelligence” team aimed at developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company has recently poached AI experts from OpenAI, Apple, Google, and other major tech players, often with aggressive compensation packages.
Kumar’s departure marks another high-profile exit from Tesla in recent months. Earlier this summer, Troy Jones, Tesla’s Vice President of Sales, Service, and Delivery for North America, left the company after 15 years.