Formerly Tesla AI x Optimus x AI HW. curious about life, consciousness, and our very existence in the matrix.
San Francisco
Joined May 2014
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The rising cost of essentials from housing to food to healthcare is the single most important thing people care about.
At the same time, we are in the midst of the biggest technology wave in human history. Digital AI has already unlocked knowledge abundance. Grok, ChatGPT et al have enabled everyone to be builders. It's nowhere done, but you see the path.
The next wave of physical AI has just started and this is the most important one. This is what has real potential to provide abundant essentials at lowest cost.
But we're not there yet. Too much capital flows to digital products while the hardest problems, robots that can build, farm, and care at scale, remain underfunded relative to their potential impact.
With AI and robotics, we can build a future where:
- Beautiful housing is accessible to everyone
- Fresh, healthy food is plentiful
- Healthcare is preventive and affordable
- Abundant energy and resilient infrastructure to power it all
- People have time for what matters
The path forward from current lack of affordability to future of abundance requires aligning incentives: redirecting capital toward physical AI and essentials, reforming policy to enable deployment, and launching moonshots that accelerate the infrastructure of abundance.
Time to build towards a solarpunk future, where the future doesn’t look like “affordable” versions of current reality, but truly looks like the future, as @grok imagined.
🤖 Made with AI
Looking forward for the chat.
In Bangalore, Mumbai & Chennai for 2 weeks! Excited to meet interesting folks in deep tech. If that’s you or someone you know, let’s connect.
🚨BLR deep-tech event 🚨 - We'll be hosting @srihari__ who led the AI + infra teams for both @teslasi @robotaxi & @Tesla_Optimus programs under @elonmusk! We'll dig into all things embodied AI, infra, scaling laws, & path to 1 billion robots milling about :)
Aug 4th (Mon) 6PM - very limited seating for cracked engineers only! Please RSVP (link in 1st cmnt). @LightspeedIndia @AbhiramTarimala @madhavchadha_ @nityabaskar
Eight years ago, I joined the @teslasi team as an engineer. Infact, my bond with the company started even earlier, back at NVIDIA, working on chip bringup for Tesla's early hardware computers. This decade-long journey has been the adventure of a lifetime. Thrilling, challenging, and above all, incredibly humbling to see what a small team can achieve in building the greatest tech advancements for humanity!
We set out to tackle one of the hardest AI and engineering problems ever: building real-world vision-only AI powered solely by cameras, squeezed into just 200W of compute on affordable, mass-manufactured cars, while maximizing intelligence per watt for real-time, safe autonomy. And we did it as a public company with an incremental shipping approach, earning trust by adding real value every update, not stuck in research silos for years. Essentially, Tesla leads in real-world AI because we dove into the toughest challenges to truly understand reality. It wasn't easy, but it was absolutely worth it! Robotaxi's arrival is proof of that effort, and our scalable approach is set to transform the world in the next few years through Optimus as well.
Two unstoppable forces made it happen: Elon and the team. Elon's singular vision, driven by his "biological neural net" that predicts the future time and again, leaves me in awe every single time! The Tesla AI team culture is something you have to experience. Pure dedication and passion for the mission, with vertical integration across HW, SW, and AI keeping innovation at warp speed. It proves a small, aligned team can achieve absolute wonders.
Thanks to @elonmusk for shaping who I am today and letting me contribute in ways that truly benefit humanity. I've been incredibly grateful and honored to contribute to @robotaxi and @Tesla_Optimus , working on the AI software engineering for both alongside an amazing team that co-designed the most performant real-world AI software/hardware systems, delivering the highest intelligence per watt. Huge thanks to Elon, @aelluswamy and @_milankovac_ for trusting me and giving me these opportunities from day one!
This has been one of the hardest decisions of my life, but to address any speculation upfront, I'm definitely not joining any competitor. I’m stepping away to pursue personal callings and ideas that are deeply close to my heart. For now, I'm taking a break from this decade-long sprint to recharge and figure out the next chapter.
Tesla's success is measured in decades, not years. So grateful for the ride!
Most people don’t realize Tesla is the only car you can buy that chauffeurs you safely and comfortably, like a 5-star uber driver.
It’s a no-brainer for family peace of mind for both everyday commute and roadtrips!
June marked the transition of Tesla from being just a car company to real-world AI and robotics company.
The future is here now!
It’s surreal that you can just order a car and the car can get delivered to your place by itself.
This is the default capability in every Tesla you can buy now!
This one is for the history books!
Proud of the @teslasi team to make this happen.
The first fully autonomous delivery of a Tesla Model Y from factory to a customer home across town, including highways, was just completed a day ahead of schedule!!
Congratulations to the @teslasi teams, both software & AI chip design!
Srihari Sampathkumar retweeted
Many more talented people who made this possible aren’t pictured here - they are the unsung heroes.
I want to give a special shoutout to the legend @patrick_cho_1 , the mastermind behind a lot of our breakthroughs.
❤️
Join the @teslasi team to push the frontier of AI software and hardware.
tesla.com/AI
A tremendous amount of testing is underway to ensure a safe and slow rollout in the beginning.
The future is going to be wild!
Srihari Sampathkumar retweeted
Thank you for being a great friend and mentor @_milankovac_
See you in Europe.
📷 First Tesla Autonomy Day 2019
Over the past 9+ years, I’ve had the immense privilege to work with some of the most brilliant minds in AI & engineering. I’ve built friendships that will last a lifetime.
This week, I’ve had to make the most difficult decision of my life and will be moving out of my position. I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad. I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. My support for @elonmusk and the team is ironclad - Tesla team forever.
Joining Tesla in 2016 as an engineer in the core Autopilot team and then leading a part of it over the years under Elon was already more than I could have hoped for.
I’ll never forget the countless hardcore debugging sessions deep into the night with my awesome colleagues, through successive generations of Autopilot computers and related software stacks, which we’ve shipped to so many people around the world. The product has become so much more since then, and I honestly can’t drive much without it anymore. It will soon catch the world off-guard and will change the way people commute, at scale.
The transition to build & lead the Optimus group early 2022, when we had nothing but a couple Kuka arms arranged upside-down, was of another level for me. We had to build an entire platform: hardware & software all at once. And this amazing team did it. They did it, I didn’t.
It’s been so humbling to work with such talented people, and I’ve got entire faith in them pushing Optimus to the next level, together with the broader Tesla AI / engineering & production teams. My departure now will not change a thing.
I want to thank my colleagues @aelluswamy and @srihari__ , who’ve been of a tremendous support over the many years we’ve worked together. But also all the outstanding leaders, engineers, recruiters, technicians, operators, HR partners and everyone I’ve been blessed to share a part of my life with.
Most importantly, I want to thank @elonmusk from the bottom of my heart for his trust and teachings over the decade we’ve worked together. Elon, you’ve taught me to discern signal from noise, hardcore resilience, and many fundamental principles of engineering. I am forever grateful.
Tesla will win, I guarantee you that.
Thanks @_milankovac_ for being a great leader, mentor and brother.
From endless late night debugs on Autopilot to the AI leaps on Optimus, it’s been an honor chasing the mission alongside you these past 8+ years.
Enjoy the much earned time with family!
Over the past 9+ years, I’ve had the immense privilege to work with some of the most brilliant minds in AI & engineering. I’ve built friendships that will last a lifetime.
This week, I’ve had to make the most difficult decision of my life and will be moving out of my position. I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad. I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. My support for @elonmusk and the team is ironclad - Tesla team forever.
Joining Tesla in 2016 as an engineer in the core Autopilot team and then leading a part of it over the years under Elon was already more than I could have hoped for.
I’ll never forget the countless hardcore debugging sessions deep into the night with my awesome colleagues, through successive generations of Autopilot computers and related software stacks, which we’ve shipped to so many people around the world. The product has become so much more since then, and I honestly can’t drive much without it anymore. It will soon catch the world off-guard and will change the way people commute, at scale.
The transition to build & lead the Optimus group early 2022, when we had nothing but a couple Kuka arms arranged upside-down, was of another level for me. We had to build an entire platform: hardware & software all at once. And this amazing team did it. They did it, I didn’t.
It’s been so humbling to work with such talented people, and I’ve got entire faith in them pushing Optimus to the next level, together with the broader Tesla AI / engineering & production teams. My departure now will not change a thing.
I want to thank my colleagues @aelluswamy and @srihari__ , who’ve been of a tremendous support over the many years we’ve worked together. But also all the outstanding leaders, engineers, recruiters, technicians, operators, HR partners and everyone I’ve been blessed to share a part of my life with.
Most importantly, I want to thank @elonmusk from the bottom of my heart for his trust and teachings over the decade we’ve worked together. Elon, you’ve taught me to discern signal from noise, hardcore resilience, and many fundamental principles of engineering. I am forever grateful.
Tesla will win, I guarantee you that.
Sanskrit is an ancient, formally specified language with recursive production rules and compositional semantics. It definitely offers deep insights for designing non-autoregressive, symbolic LLM architectures with reasoning built-in.
Excited to see this explored in open source!
Learning from human demonstrations is a major unlock for faster skill acquisition and a step in the right direction towards generalization. What makes it even more impactful is that all these tasks are handled by a single neural network.
The efficiency of Tesla’s AI stack, executing real-world AI inference entirely on the on-board computer, highlights the power of vertical integration. From AI engineers to compiler and hardware teams, every layer is codesigned: neural network architectures are built to be quantization-friendly, power-efficient and optimized for real-time embodied intelligence.
One of our goals is to have Optimus learn straight from internet videos of humans doing tasks. Those are often 3rd person views captured by random cameras etc.
We recently had a significant breakthrough along that journey, and can now transfer a big chunk of the learning directly from human videos to the bots (1st person views for now). This allows us to bootstrap new tasks much faster compared to teleoperated bot data alone (heavier operationally).
Many new skills are emerging through this process, are called for via natural language (voice/text), and are run by a single neural network on the bot (multi-tasking).
Next: expand to 3rd person video transfer (aka random internet), and push reliability via self-play (RL) in the real-, and/or synthetic- (sim / world models) world.
If you’re great at AI and want to be part of its biggest real-world applications ever, you really need to join Tesla right now.
Dancing is a hard problem not just for humans, even for robots. It stresses timing, torque and latency budgets. @Tesla_Optimus nails it like a pro dancer with all of the AI inference running on-board in real-time!
Each ride helps us improve the full autonomy stack from vehicle dispatch to remote ops. A necessary step towards FSD unsupervised.
FSD Supervised ride-hailing service is live for an early set of employees in Austin & San Francisco Bay Area.
We've completed over 1.5k trips & 15k miles of driving.
This service helps us develop & validate FSD networks, the mobile app, vehicle allocation, mission control & remote assistance operations
Autonomy is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Proud of the team shipping this milestone, just the beginning of what’s coming.