Tesla’s Optimus AI lead Ashish Kumar leaves to join Meta, raising questions about Musk’s humanoid robot future

Tesla just lost one of the key minds behind its humanoid robotics project. Ashish Kumar, who led the Optimus AI team, announced he’s leaving the company to join Meta as a research scientist. The move comes at a sensitive time for Elon Musk’s robotics ambitions, leaving investors and industry watchers asking whether Tesla can keep momentum in one of its most hyped bets.

“Decided to leave 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,” Kumar wrote in a post on X.

During his two years at Tesla, Kumar helped steer Optimus away from traditional robotics systems and toward scalable AI approaches. His team focused on reinforcement learning and video-based training — methods that promise more natural dexterity and adaptability in humanoid robots. Inside Tesla, this shift was seen as central to making Optimus more than a flashy prototype.

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His departure isn’t an isolated case. Earlier this year, Milan Kovac, Tesla’s Vice President overseeing Optimus, also walked out the door. The exits have stirred anxiety among investors, with Tesla’s stock swinging as the company’s robotics narrative faces fresh scrutiny. Musk has argued for years that Tesla’s future value rests less on cars and more on AI — going as far as to say humanoid robots could eventually represent 80% of the company’s worth.

Meta, meanwhile, has been on a hiring spree, pulling top researchers from rivals with aggressive offers. Under Mark Zuckerberg, the company is stacking its bench with reinforcement learning and computer vision talent, areas critical for building next-gen AI systems. For Kumar, the move signals both the appeal of Meta’s AI research push and the fluid movement of talent between the few firms racing to shape the humanoid future.

At Tesla, Kumar’s work was central to ditching the old robotics stack in favor of AI-driven training methods. Those experiments, showcased in demos earlier this year, gave Optimus the ability to handle tasks with surprising autonomy and dexterity. Filling his role won’t be easy, though Tesla has a track record of promoting internally — as seen when Ashok Elluswamy stepped into a top AI role after another high-profile exit.

Neither Tesla nor Meta has issued an official statement on Kumar’s departure. But across X and Reddit, discussions are heating up over what this means for Tesla’s long-term robotics roadmap. With Musk betting so heavily on Optimus as Tesla’s next growth engine, the pressure is on to show progress while fending off competitors like Meta and Boston Dynamics.

For now, Tesla presses forward, but Kumar’s exit highlights the biggest risk in the humanoid race: the war for AI talent is as decisive as the technology itself.

Tesla’s Optimus AI lead Ashish Kumar