OpenAI Is Rebooting Its Robotics Team
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
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With investment into AI-powered robotics heating up, OpenAI is formally relaunching its previously abandoned robotics team, Forbes has learned.
The company is currently hiring research engineers to rebuild the team, which it had shuttered in 2020, according to three sources. OpenAI has yet to publicly announce the details of its homegrown robotics efforts, but in a recent job listing explains that new hires would be “one of the first members of the team.” A source in position to know told Forbes the group has only existed for about two months.
OpenAI declined a request for comment.
Over the past year, OpenAI’s in-house startup fund has invested in several well-capitalized companies trying to develop humanoid robots, including Figure AI (raised $745 million), 1X Technologies ($125 million) and Physical Intelligence ($70 million). It hinted at a possible robotics reboot in a February press release for Figure’s latest fundraise; And one month later, Figure debuted a video of its robot demonstrating rudimentary speech and reasoning skills supported by a large multimodal model trained by OpenAI. “We’ve always planned to come back to robotics and we see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models,” vice president Peter Welinder, previously a member of OpenAI’s robotics team, said.
Two sources told Forbes that OpenAI intends to coexist rather than compete against such companies, building technology that the robot makers will integrate into their own systems. And the listing notes that engineers hired for the position would be tasked with collaborating with “external partners” as well as training AI models. Sources said it’s unclear whether OpenAI plans to develop robotics hardware, which it struggled to do several years ago. Its widening ambitions have recently been marked by some turbulence — a series of high-level safety team departures and an accusation from actress Scarlett Johansson that it appropriated her voice for its ChatGPT product “Sky.”
The narrower focus for the robotics team this team around may nevertheless have some overlap with companies it hopes to engage in business. Companies like Covariant, started by former OpenAI robotics team members, are also attempting to train their own robotics models. And, two sources said, OpenAI has already gone head to head with companies in this space for a limited pool of talent.
Robotics was a pillar of OpenAI’s mission from its early days. Cofounder Wojciech Zaremba oversaw a team that originally sought to build a “general purpose robot.” In 2019, more than a dozen OpenAI researchers published a paper describing how they had trained a pair of neural networks to solve a Rubik’s Cube using a single robotic hand. The authors claimed this was a foundational step towards training robotic systems to perform a variety of everyday tasks.
But in October 2020, the company abandoned its efforts, a move that Zaremba blamed on a lack of training data. “The decision [to disband the team] was quite hard for me,” Zaremba said in a 2021 interview. “But I got the realization some time ago that actually, that’s for the best from the perspective of the company.”
OpenAI ultimately redistributed its robotics team to other projects. “Because of the rapid progress in AI and its capabilities, we’ve found that other approaches, such as reinforcement learning with human feedback, lead to faster progress,” the company said in a statement at the time. Indeed, advances in reinforcement learning for human feedback helped spur the AI boom that came in the wake of the company’s release of ChatGPT the following year.
Some of OpenAI’s former robotics staffers remain at the company in other functions. For example, Zaremba helps lead development of its flagship GPT models, Welinder leads product and partnerships, Bob McGrew is vice president of research and Lilian Weng is head of safety systems and a member of OpenAI’s newly formed safety committee.
