Tesla has lost another key AI executive as Ashish Kumar, who led the Optimus AI team, announced his departure to join Meta as a research scientist. This move marks the second major exit from Tesla’s robotics division in recent months, following VP of AI and Optimus Engineering Milan Kovac’s departure in June.
Ashish Kumar shared his decision on social media, reflecting on his time at Tesla: “It’s been an incredible ride leading the Optimus AI team. 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.”
Interestingly, Kumar indicated that his move wasn’t financially motivated. “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 stated.
Kumar’s transition to Meta comes amid aggressive hiring in AI research across major tech companies. Meta has been expanding its AI research capabilities substantially under Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” strategy that paradoxically increased investments in artificial intelligence.
For Tesla, retaining top AI talent has become increasingly challenging as competitors offer compelling research opportunities and compensation packages. Optimus team has been reshaping robotics development by applying techniques from Tesla’s self-driving vehicle program to humanoid robots.
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