OpenAI revives robotics team, aiming for collaboration in the robotics industry

With investments in AI-driven robotics surging, OpenAI has decided to reassemble its robotics team, which was disbanded three years ago.

The company is now recruiting research engineers for the newly formed team. A job posting confirmed by OpenAI states that the new hires will be among the team’s first members.

Re-assembled robotics team

Forbes, citing three informed sources, reported that the new robotics team was established about two months ago.

According to a job listing on OpenAI’s website, the company has not provided detailed information about its robotics plans. However, it mentions that research engineers on the robotics team will be responsible for training multimodal models, developing new features for partners, and researching and optimizing core models.

This includes exploring new model architectures, collecting robot data, and conducting evaluations. Insiders revealed that OpenAI aims to coexist with, rather than compete against, other robotics companies by integrating its technology into their systems. It remains unclear whether OpenAI will develop its robotics hardware.

Over the past year, OpenAI’s internal venture fund has invested in several companies developing humanoid robots, including Figure AI, 1X Technologies, and Physical Intelligence. In mid-March, Figure AI uploaded a video showcasing the voice and inference capabilities of its general-purpose humanoid robot, Figure 01, which is based on OpenAI’s large multimodal models.

Peter Welinder, OpenAI’s Vice President of Product and Partnerships stated that the company has been planning to return to robotics. “Our collaboration with Figure has demonstrated the potential of humanoid robots, powered by multimodal models,” he said.

According to Welinder’s LinkedIn profile, he was part of the OpenAI robotics team from 2017 to 2020.

Robotics from the start

Robotics has always been a part of OpenAI’s mission. Co-founder Wojciech Zaremba led the robotics team intending to create a general-purpose robot. In 2019, OpenAI researchers published a paper explaining how they trained a neural network in a virtual environment to enable a single robotic arm to solve a Rubik’s cube.

However, in October 2020, OpenAI abruptly halted its robotics research and disbanded the team in 2021. At the time, Zaremba attributed the decision to a lack of training data, as reported by VentureBeat. He noted that OpenAI had shifted its focus to areas with more readily available data.

Following the disbandment, some team members remained at the company in other roles. For example, Zaremba helped develop the GPT flagship models, Welinder took charge of product and partnership relations, Bob McGrew became the head of research, and Lilian Weng took over the safety systems team.