Ashish Kumar, who led Tesla’s Optimus AI team for more than two years, has left the company to join Meta as a research scientist.
Kumar, a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of California, Berkeley, started his new role at Meta this month.
Before joining Tesla in mid-2023, he worked as a research fellow at Microsoft.
On X, Kumar described his time at Tesla as “an incredible ride,” adding: “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.”
He did not provide reasons for his departure. However, when asked, Kumar denied that the reason was related to money.
“Financial upside at Tesla was significantly larger,” he wrote. “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.”
His academic background also includes a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.
Kumar had showcased his robotics expertise before Tesla, with live demos of quadruped robots navigating stairs, furniture, and uneven terrain at major conferences including CVPR 2022 in New Orleans and CoRL 2022 in Auckland.
The program, which Musk has called critical to Tesla’s future, has seen multiple iterations: the original prototype in 2022, a second-generation robot in 2023 with faster walking speed and improved motor control, and most recently the so-called “Optimus 2.5” shown earlier this month.
Musk has described the upcoming third-generation design as “sublime.”
His exit comes just days after PharmAGRI, an agricultural and pharmaceutical infrastructure firm, announced it had signed a letter of intent with Tesla to deploy up to 10,000 Optimus robots from the third generation onward.
The company said the humanoids would be used in farming, pharmaceutical ingredient production, and drug manufacturing facilities.
Musk disputed images used by PharmAGRI showing robots at work in its facilities, calling them “fake.”
Tesla has repeatedly highlighted the importance of Optimus to its long-term growth.
Musk said earlier this month that “~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus,” implying the business would need to generate nearly $400 billion in annual sales to meet that projection — more than four times Tesla’s $97.7 billion in revenue last year.
Despite the ambition, production has lagged behind targets.
Musk said in January the company aimed to produce at least 5,000 robots in 2025, but reports in July suggested only a few hundred units had been built in the first eight months.
Tesla had targeted 5,000 to 10,000 units for this year and up to 100,000 in 2026.
