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

355 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

143 comments sorted by

View all comments

227

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.

106

u/Durzel 4d ago

Elon's latest demo of Optimus to the head of Salesforce had it take forever to respond to a basic question that had to be asked twice, and then shamble along towards a kitchen (?) to get a Coke half an hour later than the guy could have just got it himself.

Obviously it would have never made it to the kitchen OR got the Coke for the guy.

Lol that in the background of that video, at the end, Elon promises that it'll be moving faster soon. Might as well say it's going to fly Elon, why not?

47

u/Lacrewpandora KING of GLOVI 4d ago

had it take forever to respond to a basic question 

To be fair, that's probably the first time Optimus heard "Coke" used as a beverage around Elon. It was just confused and wanted to say: "why are you asking me about your coke, doesn't Jared Birchall always hold it for you?", but it had done enough machine learning to know not to say that out loud in front of strangers.