AsianFin -- Ashish Kumar, head of Tesla’s Optimus AI team, has left the company to join Meta as a research scientist.

Kumar joined Tesla in July 2023 to oversee AI development for the Optimus humanoid robot project and departed in September 2025. During his more than two-year tenure, he led the team in developing scalable AI approaches, replacing traditional robotics control stacks with reinforcement learning techniques, and improving the robot’s dexterity through video-based learning.

The Optimus project is now led by Ashok Elluswamy, who took over as project head in June 2025.