OpenAI reassigns robotics researchers to other teams as general-purpose models might make specialized robotics AI unnecessary

OpenAI is disbanding its robotics team again, moving robotics researchers to Mark Chen's main research team and the applied robotics and hardware teams to Greg Brockman's Applied organization, according to Fortune. The company reportedly believes general-purpose models like GPT-6 Astra can control robots directly, citing an Nvidia study where an Astra-powered agent reached a 74.8 percent success rate on simulated robotics tasks versus 51 percent for the best specialized models, and a StationeryBench comparison where Astra fully completed 7 of 100 tasks while Ai2's MolmoAct2 completed none. OpenAI shut down its robotics division in 2020 and rebuilt it in 2024, with CEO Sam Altman reportedly targeting a first public robot demo for 2027.