Exclusive: OpenAI disbands its stand-alone robotics team as its general models start running robots
This discovery is what motivated OpenAI to disband the stand alone robotics team and move the affiliated researchers onto teams working on more general AI models.
Key points
- The reorganization reflects a bet that is gaining traction across the AI industry: that general-purpose models built for language, code, and vision can also be used for “embodied AI”—where AI models control devices that can act in the physical world, such as robots, driverless cars, or drones.
- OpenAI said it has reassigned its robotics research team to the company’s main research team, reporting to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while the applied robotics and hardware teams have been reassigned to the company’s larger Applied organization, which reports to OpenAI President Greg Brockman.
- It said that at the start of the year, the company’s researchers assumed the best way to make progress on robotics was to build on its work on AI models such as Sora, a video generation model that, in order to create realistic videos, had to have some implicit understanding of how the physical world works.
OpenAI rebuilt a stand alone robotics team in 2024, announcing a partnership with the startup Figure to develop AI models for humanoid robots.
Additional details
- But since then, the company spokesperson said, the company’s general-purpose frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, have shown that can be directly applied to robotics.
- The company spokesperson said that despite the reorganization, OpenAI remains committed to bringing general-purpose robots into the world.
- This would obviate the need to have separate robotics teams building specialized AI models just to be the digital “brains” for robots.
- A company spokesperson said that robotics remains a core part of OpenAI’s long-term vision and portrayed the reorganization as a sign of the company’s commitment to robotics, rather than a retreat from it.
- This line of thinking—that general AI models can be applied directly to controlling robots without….
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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