Headquartered in San Francisco in the United States, artificial intelligence research organisation OpenAI has consistently stayed in the news in the past few years. Be it coming out with the internet’s much-loved ChatGPT in 2022, the whole investors board vs CEO Sam Altman drama in 2023, or now, the news that it might be getting back into the humanoid robots space. We say ‘getting back’ because for the longest time OpenAI did have a dedicated robotics team, which it had to shut down three years ago, due to “insufficient training data”, the company’s co-founder Wojciech Zaremba, who also used to head the team, revealed in a podcast interview at the time. In an interesting turn of events, on December 24 last year, The Information, a US-based tech/ business publication, quoted “two people with direct knowledge” on the subject saying that OpenAI has been exploring building a humanoid robot.
A humanoid robot has physical features similar to humans in skeletal form — arms, legs, head, etc, and is trained to do human-like tasks, ranging from simple to extremely complex too.
In the meantime
With OpenAI returning to the terrain, it might be looking at exciting developments coming up. But the company wasn’t never really too far from the robotics space. Even after shutting down the robotic division, OpenAI does seem to have been invested in the field, quite literally. In February this year, OpenAI Startup Fund along with Microsoft, Bezos Expeditions, Parkway Venture Capital, ARK Invest, Intel Capital, Nvidia, and Align Ventures, invested in Figure AI, a US-based startup that has been trying to “bring a general purpose humanoid to life”.
Peter Welinder, VP of product and partnerships at OpenAI, had told the media, “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.”
The company also invested in 1X Technologies, “an AI robotics company producing humanoids capable of human-like movements and behaviours”, according to its website, to help them integrate GPT AI models with robotic systems. In November this year, OpenAI invested in another AI and robotics-centred start-up called Physical Intelligence.
Not just that, reportedly at the beginning of 2024, OpenAI also was looking to hire people who specialised in robotics, suggesting that it might be looking to rebuild its OG team.
Endless possibilities
Recently, humanoid robots have been employed to test AI capabilities in workspaces, warehouses, other physical spaces, etc. At the moment, the big players in the humanoid robotics field are Boston Dynamics, Tesla Optimus, Sanctuary AI, Xiaomi’s CyberOne, and Agility Robotics, among others.
With OpenAI re-entering the field, the possibilities are endless on what the future developments could look like. However, it’s noteworthy that The Information’s report didn’t conclusively say whether robotics is a high-priority matter for OpenAI or not.
Nevertheless, with the company’s recent launches such as o3 AI models, the developers might be on the path to create robots that could perform complicated tasks, respond to humans, initiate problem solving, and be deployed in different industries, considering that the company’s latest AI models have been developed with advanced reasoning capabilities. Going ahead, these robots (if powered with features that are adaptable and the robots made accessible) could revolutionise industries like healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality, and perhaps even caregiving.
