OpenAI is apparently disbanding its robotics team again, but this time for different reasons than in 2020.
Rather than abandoning robotics, the company wants to accelerate it by folding researchers into other teams. Robotics researchers are moving to the main research team under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while the applied robotics and hardware teams join Greg Brockman’s Applied organization.
OpenAI made the decision on such short notice that it had already booked a booth at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Austin, which then sat empty, Fortune reports. OpenAI apparently believes that general-purpose models like GPT-6 Astra can control robots directly, reducing the need for specialized robotics models.
In an Nvidia study, an Astra-powered agent achieved a 74.8 percent success rate on simulated robotics tasks, compared to 51 percent for the best specialized models. The tests used a simulated DROID robot, not a physical one.
A new robotics benchmark called StationeryBench compared GPT-6 Astra with Ai2’s MolmoAct2 on five tasks involving desk objects on dual-arm YAM robotic arms. Across 200 trials, Astra fully completed 7 out of 100 tasks, while MolmoAct2 didn’t complete a single one. Astra’s average progress score was 46, compared to 12 for MolmoAct2. In another test, Astra running on a humanoid robot navigated and cleaned up a kitchen.
It remains unclear how much robotics data OpenAI and others incorporated during training. Other large general-purpose models from Anthropic and Google have also made recent progress on robotics tasks. Specialized robotics models may still have advantages in cost and reliability as well as speed and energy consumption, even if they don’t generalize as well.
Yoav Artzi, an AI researcher at Cornell University and Google DeepMind, also sees Astra as a major leap in spatial understanding. On the still-unpublished REMAP benchmark, GPT-6 Astra reaches near-human accuracy, according to Artzi. He suspects that OpenAI may have trained the model on large amounts of 3D training data such as Blender scenes.
OpenAI and robots, it’s complicated
OpenAI shut down its robotics division in 2020 because, according to co-founder Wojciech Zaremba, the company lacked the training data it needed and large language models were a faster path to AGI. The company rebuilt the team in 2024. CEO Sam Altman is reportedly targeting a first public robot demo for 2027, and OpenAI wants to build its own everyday robots in the long term. But the company also faces heavy financial pressure to focus on its core AI business, where it has lost significant ground to Anthropic.
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