Zuckerberg has poached Musk's Robot No. 1

Elon Musk is busy laying off employees, while Mark Zuckerberg continues to hire.

Isn't it? Optimus AI team leader Ashish Kumar has decided to leave Tesla to join Meta as a research scientist.

As for his farewell remarks, he stated:

Leading the Optimus AI team has been an exciting and unforgettable experience.

We are fully advancing scalable methods—replacing traditional tech stacks with reinforcement learning and enhancing the agility of robots through video learning.

He further emphasized that artificial intelligence is the key factor in unlocking humanoid robots.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg's image of spending money to hire has deeply ingrained in people's minds, prompting netizens to sharply comment, is there 1 billion dollars?

Optimus Team Leaders Leaving One After Another

So who exactly is this Optimus AI team leader?

Ashish Kumar, a PhD from UC Berkeley, was mentored by Professor Jitendra Malik, who is revered by Fei-Fei Li as the "academic grandfather," and is famous for his research in the field of computer vision.

In 2015, Ashish graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, and then worked as a researcher for two years at Microsoft's lab in India, focusing on resource-efficient machine learning algorithms.

In 2017, Ashish returned to academia, starting his PhD at UC Berkeley, and in July 2023, he joined Tesla as an ML scientist, becoming the AI leader for Optimus more than a year later.

In addition, Ashish is not the only one leaving Optimus; in June of this year, Optimus project leader Milan Kovac announced his departure.

Milan Kovac graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 2008 and has worked as a game developer His first job was at the Belgian motion recognition company SoftKinetic, mainly responsible for porting work across different platforms, and later he developed visual components for Intel.

Four years later, the company was acquired by Sony, and Kovac moved through several companies before officially joining Tesla in April 2016 as an engineer on the Autopilot core team, responsible for the underlying process management of Autopilot. He later served as the autonomous driving software engineering manager, senior engineering manager, and Autopilot software engineering director.

In 2022, Kovac was promoted to head of the Optimus project. Under his leadership, Tesla's humanoid robot evolved from a concept into a fully functional second-generation bipedal robot capable of working autonomously in Tesla factories.

As a nine-year veteran of Tesla, Kovac started with autonomous driving and then, as a founding member, built Optimus from the ground up. In this regard, Musk specifically thanked him for his outstanding contributions over the past decade in a reply to his tweet.

(Why wasn't there any thanks for this project leader's departure? Could it be...)

Regarding the robot, after Tesla released "Master Plan 4," Musk revealed:

80% of Tesla's future value will come from Optimus.

But with this project leader frequently leaving, can Musk's robotic ambitions proceed smoothly?

One More Thing

Musk faces external competition from Zuckerberg and internal conflicts with close advisors and executives.

According to the Wall Street Journal, several executives at xAI have left after conflicts with Musk's two closest advisors due to concerns about the company's management and financial situation.

△ Jared Birchall and John Herin

These two advisors are Jared Birchall and John Herin, who are primarily responsible for overseeing the daily operations of xAI, while Musk, as CEO, is responsible for making final decisions.

Insiders say that some xAI executives internally opposed Birchall and Herin's attempts to manage the company on Musk's behalf, believing they lacked a formal chain of command So, does Musk's AI journey need to first adjust its organizational structure next?

Article author: Quantum Bit, source: Quantum Bit, original title: "Zuckerberg has poached Musk's Robot No. 1"

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