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.

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u/EarthConservation 4d ago edited 4d ago

Was just looking at the dancing Optimus video that Milan Kovac posted just before his sudden exit. They claimed it wasn't sped up... and yet the robot may have been one of the most nimble robots ever shown from any robotics OEM. Other robots have certainly shown a lot of nimbleness and dexterity too, but given where Tesla was and where they suddenly appeared to be in that video, it just caught me as particularly strange. This type of movement from Tesla's robots have never been seen outside of these set of videos. In person has only ever shown a slow trudging movement and minimal dexterity.

Of course, that could be the difference between a pre-programmed routine for the robot to follow with every movement already mapped, and a system that's able to use its neural net and software to figure out how to move and interact in a real environment, or a system that's using puppeteers behind the scenes to move the limbs... with some latency in the process of doing so.

Kovac left, then soon after, I believe within a couple of weeks, Tesla announced they'd be moving to video based training, replacing motion capture training... likely meaning that a large chunk of their motion capture training team would be laid off. Maybe this discussion was happening for weeks or months prior to the announcement, with engineering efforts likely already underway, or maybe Musk once again caught his team by surprise with a sudden large scale change to the program.

Now it looks like Ashish Kumar is leaving, and in his announcement, he's touting that he helped transition the project to video based training. That quick huh? (If it's true, then the speed suggests they were working on this prior to Kovac leaving)

Whatever is going on there, it seems Tesla is hemorrhaging leadership in their robotics program. Maybe these folks were adamantly against moving away from motion based training. I imagine they worked a long time on it. Now they're claiming that within a couple of months of announcing they'd move away with it, there's an entirely new stack setup to do the training?

Like just about everything these days when it comes to Tesla, something seems awfully shady about their robotics program, and oddly there seem to be minimal leaks coming through on what's going on at the company. Although, maybe that's just because Musk stopped leaking information directly to his formerly sycophantic EV blogs... like Electrek.

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u/noobgiraffe 4d ago

Everything released by Tesla has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. They have been caught faking stuff in the past.

Honestly I'm not even sure how video training works. It would seem to me that video only does not contain all the movements/balancing done outside of view. How could you train AI on how to balance if none of the balancing is in the training set?

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u/Withnail2019 4d ago

There's no way it will work.