OpenAI once again disbands its robotics team, with staff merged into other departments
Understand this story
OpenAI has once again disbanded its robotics team, merging the robotics researchers into the main research team led by Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, while the applied robotics and hardware teams join the applied division led by Greg Brockman. This is the second time OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team; the team had previously been cut and then rebuilt.
AI overview based on source reports · Updated 2 hr ago
Coverage timeline
Follow the coverage to explore different perspectives.
- The DecoderOpenAI 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.
Activity for this story
Not enough continuous observations to show a trend yet.