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. After publication, the company confirmed that it had begun hiring for the team. 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.”
Full commentary : After disbanding its efforts to build a general purpose robot in 2020, OpenAI is now recruiting fresh talent for its robotics division.
