Amid renewed interest in AI-powered robotics, OpenAI is officially rebooting its robotics program, which was disbanded nearly four years ago.
Citing three sources, media reported on Friday that OpenAI is currently recruiting key research engineers for its new robotics team, which has been operational for two months.
An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the recruitment efforts, stating that recent hires will be "among the first members of this brand-new team." OpenAI has not yet publicly announced further details about its in-house robotics technology.
Robotics was a key focus area for OpenAI in its early days, with co-founder Wojciech Zaremba leading a team that initially sought to build a "general-purpose robot."
However, due to a lack of training data and other reasons, OpenAI was forced to disband the robotics team in October 2020, reassigning researchers to other projects.
Now, with the rapid advancement of AI technology and the increasingly promising prospects for robotics applications, OpenAI has decided to return to the world of robotics.
Over the past year, OpenAI's internal startup fund has invested in several companies developing humanoid robots, including Figure AI, 1X Technologies, and Physical Intelligence, with funding ranging from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars.
OpenAI Vice President Peter Welinder stated that through collaborations with companies like Figure, OpenAI hopes to explore the level of intelligence that humanoid robots can achieve with the support of large multimodal AI models.
This suggests that OpenAI may focus on developing the "brain" of robots, namely highly intelligent AI systems, while leaving the development of the robot body to its partners.
Industry insiders pointed out that with OpenAI's technical strength and industry influence, its move to restart the robotics team will undoubtedly further promote the integration and development of AI and robotics technologies. However, OpenAI also faces challenges such as talent competition, as some robotics companies have begun to develop their own AI models, and it is not ruled out that the two sides will compete in certain areas in the future.
