OpenAI is about to enter the field of humanoid robots. OpenAI is investing in the robotics field and restarting research on humanoid robots. Its greatest advantage may lie in its powerful large language model and its own strong computing power support.
In the past year, OpenAI has hinted many times at a renewed enthusiasm for robotics projects. It has invested in startups that develop robotics hardware and software, such as Figure and Physical Intelligence, and has restarted its internal robotics software team that was disbanded four years ago.
Now, OpenAI may take its interest in robotics to a new level. According to two people familiar with the matter, the company has recently considered developing a humanoid robot.
OpenAI’s advantage lies in its powerful large language model and computing power support. If it enters the robotics field, it may benefit from the rumored custom artificial intelligence chip development work in progress. Recently, there have been reports that OpenAI is collaborating with Broadcom and TSMC to develop an inference processor. In theory, it can use these partnerships to commission the customization of another chip optimized for on-board artificial intelligence software for humanoid robots. Generally, custom processors perform better than commercially available chips.
However, there are very few details about this potential project. It is not clear when OpenAI plans to launch a humanoid robot and what the target application scenarios are. And some people familiar with the matter say that the robotics project is not OpenAI’s top priority. It has a lower priority than many other technologies and products. The current focus remains on strengthening advanced reasoning models and developing AI assistants.
OpenAI’s robotics team once trained a robotic arm that can solve a Rubik’s Cube and also open-sourced Roboschool, a set of simulation tools that can be used for developing robots. This team was disbanded in 2021 for various reasons. At that time, OpenAI’s reason was “lack of data needed to train robots to use artificial intelligence for movement and reasoning.”
Since last year, news of restarting OpenAI’s robotics team has been continuously heard. In June 2023, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said when mentioning robotics research: “We are very interested in this and have struggled. We hope that one day we can resume our robotics research.”
Even though internal robotics research was interrupted, OpenAI has never given up on laying out the robotics field. In recent years, through its internal venture fund, OpenAI has actively invested in several companies focused on developing humanoid robotics technologies, including Figure AI, a robotics developer, 1X Technologies, and Physical Intelligence, a developer of general-purpose robotics models. The advanced vision, intelligent voice, and graphical neural network systems used by these three companies are provided by OpenAI’s GPT series models.
Among them, Figure AI’s latest humanoid robot, Figure 02, uses an artificial intelligence model developed in cooperation with OpenAI to process voice commands from warehouse workers. It has “joined” the BMW factory and is used to move metal parts. 1X is currently promoting the humanoid robot NEO Beta. This product was released in August this year and is a prototype humanoid robot designed specifically for households. It has unlocked kitchen scenarios.
Peter Welinder, vice president of OpenAI and a former member of the robotics team, said: “We always planned to return to the robotics field. The cooperation with Figure AI has shown us a way, that is, to explore the outstanding achievements that humanoid robots can achieve driven by high-performance multimodal models.”
