Tesla lost its Optimus humanoid robot artificial intelligence executive slightly more than two weeks after CEO Elon Musk claimed that the Optimus product will make up around 80% of the EV giant's value in the future.
Ashish Kumar, Tesla's AI lead for Optimus, announced on X late Thursday he had decided to leave Musk's company. Kumar joined Mark Zuckerberg's team at Meta as a research scientist, according to LinkedIn.
"It's been an incredible ride leading the Optimus AI team. We went all-in on scalable methods — swapping the classical stacks with reinforcement learning & scaling dexterity by learning from videos. AI is the most significant bit to unlock humanoids," Kumar wrote on X Thursday.
Kumar added that his decision to leave Tesla wasn't based on personal financials, writing that "if I wanted to optimize for money, I would have stayed at Tesla."
Tesla is losing the Optimus AI team leader as Musk goes all-in on robots, autonomous driving and AI. On Sept. 1, Musk posted to X that about "80% of Tesla's value will be Optimus." However, Musk also recently decided to scale back in-house artificial intelligence efforts.
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Last month, Musk scrapped its Dojo supercomputer effort and disbanded the team, with the decision to rely on Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices for compute chips along with Samsung for manufacturing. At the time, Musk said Tesla was streamlining to focus on developing inference chips to enable its AI models to make real-time decisions.
Tesla shareholders are also due during the Nov. 6 annual meeting to vote on whether the company will invest in xAI, Musk's AI venture and competitor to OpenAI and Microsoft. The Tesla board is requesting a "yes" vote to the proposal.
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Tesla Stock Performance
TSLA advanced 2.2% to 426.07 during Friday's stock market, after a 2.1% drop, to 416.85, on Thursday. Tesla stock ended Friday up 7.6% on the week and has gained 27.6% in September.
Regulatory filings on Monday showed Musk had, on Friday, made his first TSLA purchase on the open market since February 2020, scooping up $1 billion worth of Tesla stock in 26 separate purchases.
The stock jumped as high as 432.22 on Thursday, the highest since late January. TSLA is now just about 15% below its all-time high of 488.54.
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Baird analyst Ben Kallo on Friday upgraded Tesla to outperform from neutral with a price target of 548, up from 320. That represents further 30% upside from current trading levels. Kallo wrote that Tesla's vehicle volumes will likely decline again in 2025 and near-term fundamentals "will be choppy," but that TSLA could outperform as Tesla is increasingly viewed as the leader in physical artificial intelligence.
Last week, Tesla stock spiked 12.9% to 395.94, racing past a consolidation buy point of 367.71, according to MarketSurge charts.
At this point, investors looking to start a position should see if Tesla pulls back or perhaps forges a handle to a consolidation going back to end of last year. IBD added TSLA to its Leaderboard watchlist Tuesday.
Investors can keep tabs on the IBD Leaderboard watchlist, the IBD 50 list of top growth stocks and IBD SwingTrader along with the IBD Sector Leaders list.
Tesla stock has a 76 Composite Rating out of a best-possible 99. The stock also has an 88 Relative Strength Rating and a 53 EPS Rating.
Please follow Kit Norton on X @KitNorton for more coverage.
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