Tesla has hired Yilun Chen, a former Apple robotics researcher with nearly four years of experience, to join its Optimus humanoid robot development team. Chen announced the move on LinkedIn, praising Tesla's innovative lab environment after wrapping up his tenure at Apple last week. This hire highlights the intensifying talent competition in the humanoid robotics field.
Yilun Chen, who served as a Research Scientist on Apple's Robotics Research Team from January to November 2025, focused on embodied AI, including robotics foundation models, sim-to-real transfer, visual-language-action systems, dexterous manipulation, and humanoid whole-body control. Prior to that, from January 2022 to January 2025, he worked as a Machine Learning Engineer in Apple's Special Projects Group on photorealistic scene generation, generative modeling of agent behavior, and reinforcement learning for autonomy systems. Chen's earlier roles included contributions to Uber's GPU-based path planning for self-driving cars and Lyft's autonomous vehicle planning systems.
In his LinkedIn post dated around November 30, 2025, Chen described his time at Apple as an “unforgettable chapter,” where he grew from an individual contributor to a tech lead. He expressed gratitude, stating, “I’m sincerely grateful for the opportunities to work on so many amazing projects and products across the company.” He hinted at unrevealed projects, adding, “Though many of them are not public yet (wait for the surprise!).”
Transitioning to Tesla's Optimus AI team, Chen called humanoid robots “the ultimate dream of our generation,” noting recent advances in large language models and physical AI. After visiting Tesla's Optimus lab, he was “totally blown away by the scale and sophistication of the Optimus lab and deep dedication of people.” Describing his first week, he highlighted a “flat team structure, spontaneous deep technical discussions, direct communications across levels, hardcore building and crazy ideas with super fast iterations.” He concluded, “You can feel the energy to change the world here. I really like it so far.”
This move occurs amid Tesla's talent challenges, including the September 2025 departure of Optimus AI team lead Ashish Kumar to Meta and June 2025 exit of VP Milan Kovac, with leadership shifting to Ashok Elluswamy. A startup, Sunday Robotics, recently poached several Tesla engineers. Meanwhile, Apple reorganized its robotics division seven months ago, moving it to the hardware group under John Ternus to address slow AI progress, amid rumors of a tabletop robot launch next year. Apple's efforts remain in early stages, contrasting Tesla's production plans for Optimus V3 in early 2026 and scaling to 1 million units annually by late 2026 at Gigafactory Texas.
