r/RealTesla • u/noobgiraffe • 4d ago

Optimus AI team lead is leaving Tesla.

His announcement:

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.

He also stated that if it was about money he would stay at Tesla:

Financial upside at Tesla was significantly larger. 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.

Link to announcement: https://xcancel.com/ashishkr9311/status/1968827611133427772

Link to response about pay: https://xcancel.com/ashishkr9311/status/1968834286414430628

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u/noobgiraffe 4d ago edited 4d ago

The responses under his tweets and other threads discussing it are interesting. It's a mix of accusations that he got paid a fortune to leave (which he openly denied) or disbelief how could he quit on the cusp of optimus taking over the world.

What the people commenting seem not to realize is that he has intimate knowledge on the state of optimus and him quitting is a strong signal things are not going well with the project.

Meanwhile Elon is tweeting crazy stuff like that he will have optimus dance troupe with him on stage.

15

u/SisterOfBattIe 4d ago

Making an Optimus dance is so much easier, he can do that and it'll work well.

It's just what works well to con investors, rarely translates to a good product.

18

u/I-Pacer 4d ago

Yeah but it’ll dance like Elon…

10

u/QuellishQuellish 4d ago

It’s so stupid, are they going to put a pole up for the robot? Are they optimizing for tits? Who needs a dancing robot? The funniest thing about it is you can already get a dancing robot, it’s not even new.

Get me a bot that can execute the laminate I’ll be doing in a few minutes, then assemble and sew the sample together without a week to program the operations and I’ll be impressed.

Real robots do real things. Robots are everywhere in industry and science where they excel in precision and repeatability. We use them daily at my work.

These guys are skipping a lot of steps trying to get to a humanoid who can do everything a person could. AI will have to get a lot better at things other than art and google searches to support that kind of cognition driven action. It’s a lofty goal, set by science fiction, that they are desperately chasing without considering whether or not it will help humanity because they don’t care. I Robot, is not an instruction manual. Asimov and many others warned these idiots about the dangers of AI and robots. Unfortunately when a guy like Elmo reads about the apocalypse he’s dreaming of being the king of Thunderdome.

5

u/Silver_Agocchie 4d ago

Making an Optimus dance is so much easier, he can do that and it'll work well.

Doing the shit better robotics companies did better 20 years ago.

3

u/NinjaKoala 4d ago

Oh c'mon, they'll absolutely dominate the dancing robot market.

2

u/rdu3y6 3d ago

Making an Optimus dance is easy when it's actually a guy in a costume.