According to media reports, OpenAI has repeatedly hinted at reigniting its passion for robotics projects in the past year: investing in startups that develop robot hardware and software, such as Figure and Physical Intelligence, and restarting an internal robot software team that disbanded four years ago.
Now, OpenAI may take this interest to a new level. According to two individuals with direct knowledge of the discussion, the company is currently considering developing a humanoid robot.
Humanoid robots, designed and manufactured to mimic human form, structure, and behavioral characteristics, are commonly referred to as humanoid robots.
The biggest advantage of OpenAI may lie in its powerful large models and strong computing power support.
According to reports, if this plan is ultimately realized, OpenAI's entry into the robotics field may benefit from its rumored ongoing development of customized artificial intelligence chips. Recently, it has been reported that the company is collaborating with Broadcom and TSMC to develop an inference processor. In theory, OpenAI can leverage these partnerships to commission the customization of another chip optimized for its humanoid robot in car artificial intelligence software. Usually, custom processors can provide better performance than commercially available chips.
However, there are still few details about this potential project, and it is currently unclear when OpenAI plans to launch its own humanoid robot and its target application scenarios.
And one of the insiders said that the robotics project is not OpenAI's top priority, and its priority is lower than many other technologies and products. Currently, OpenAI's focus is still on strengthening advanced inference models and developing AI assistants.
OpenAI's robotics team has trained a robotic arm capable of solving Rubik's Cube puzzles and also open-source Roboschool, a simulation tool for developing robots. The team was disbanded in 2021 for various reasons, with OpenAI citing a lack of data needed to train robots to use artificial intelligence for movement and reasoning.
Since last year, there have been continuous reports of restarting the OpenAI team. We are very interested in this and have struggled with it, hoping that one day we can resume research on robots, "OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in June 2023, referring to robotics research.
It is worth noting that even though internal robot research has been interrupted, OpenAI has never given up on laying out the field of robotics. In recent years, OpenAI has actively invested in several companies focused on developing humanoid robot technology through its internal startup fund, including robot machine developers Figure AI and 1X Technologies, as well as robot general model developer Physical Intelligence. The advanced visual, intelligent speech, and graphic neural network systems used by these three companies are provided by OpenAI's GPT series models.
The latest humanoid robot in Figure AI, Figure 02, uses an artificial intelligence model developed in collaboration with OpenAI to process voice commands from warehouse workers. It has been "employed" at BMW to move metal parts; 1X is currently promoting the humanoid robot NEO Beta, which was released in August this year. It is a prototype humanoid robot designed specifically for households and has unlocked kitchen scenes.
Peter Verlinde, Vice President of OpenAI and former member of the robotics team, once said, "We have always planned to return to the field of robotics, and our collaboration with Figure AI has shown us a path to explore the outstanding achievements that humanoid robots can achieve under the drive of high-performance multimodal models