The pinnacle of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robotic program, Milan Kovac, is leaving the corporate according to Bloomberg News.
The departure comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed the corporate could have “hundreds” of Optimus robots working in its factories by the top of this yr. “And we count on to scale Optimus up sooner than any product, I believe, in historical past, to get to tens of millions of items per yr as quickly as doable,” Musk stated final month.
Kovac has labored at Tesla for practically 10 years, with a lot of that point coming as a high engineer on the Autopilot crew. He was tapped to assist lead improvement of Optimus in 2022 and have become a vp overseeing this system in late 2024.
“I’m driving the Optimus program (Tesla’s humanoid robotic) & all its engineering groups,” Kovac beforehand wrote on his LinkedIn profile. “Individually, I’m additionally driving the engineering groups answerable for all of the software program foundations & infrastructure widespread between Optimus and Autopilot.”
Ashok Elluswamy, the vp of Tesla’s AI software program division, will take over the Optimus challenge in accordance with Bloomberg.