Abstract:
On November 14, OpenAI confirmed that it had abolished the independent robot research team and reassigned relevant personnel to the core research and application business departments. The company stated that this adjustment does not mean withdrawing from the field of robots, but it hopes to further integrate robot research and development with general artificial intelligence model research.
According to the arrangement, robotics researchers will be integrated into the core research team led by Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while the robotics application and hardware teams will be transferred to the application business unit headed by President Greg Brockman.
This adjustment reflects changes in OpenAI’s judgment on the robotics technology route. The company stated that general artificial intelligence models, including GPT-6 Astra, have demonstrated the ability to directly perform some robot control tasks, so there is no need to rely entirely on independently developed robot-specific basic models.
A recent study published by NVIDIA showed that in the RoboLab-120 simulation robot operation test, the agent system based on GPT-6 Astra achieved a task success rate of 74.8%, which was higher than the 51.0% of the best-performing dedicated robot model on the test rankings. However, this achievement relies on an additional agent running environment and is only achieved under simulation conditions. General-purpose models still have obvious limitations in inference speed and running costs, and cannot yet directly replace dedicated robot control systems in real scenarios.
This reorganization also occurs at a time when OpenAI is facing cost control pressure. The company, which reported operating losses of $10.9 billion in its most recent quarter, is advancing a new round of financing and preparing for an initial public offering that could take place in early 2027. Although it continues to shrink some non-core businesses, OpenAI still plans to independently develop humanoid robots. CEO Altman has previously proposed to strive for the first public demonstration in 2027.
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