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2025-09-19 10:39:30
[Tesla Optimus AI team leader Ashish Kumar leaves to join Meta] Ashish Kumar, the head of Tesla's Optimus AI team, announced his departure and joined Meta as a research scientist. Ashish Kumar joined Tesla in July 2023 and was responsible for the AI development of the Optimus project until his departure in September 2025. During his more than two years at Tesla, he led the team to focus on the research of scalable AI methods, replacing the traditional robot control stack with reinforcement learning technology, and improving the dexterity of robots through video learning. The head of Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot project is Ashok Elluswamy, who took over as the project leader in June 2025.
