Article · AI translation
Thanks to IT Home reader 乌蝇哥的左手 for the tip!
IT Home reported on November 14 that Fortune published a post yesterday (November 13) revealing that OpenAI had disbanded its independent robotics team and reassigned its members to other departments. OpenAI confirmed the organizational change to Fortune, but emphasized that it was not withdrawing from robotics. Robotics remains central to its long-term vision, and the restructuring is intended to accelerate research and development.
Under the restructuring, robotics researchers have joined the core research team and report to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen. The applied robotics and hardware teams have moved to the larger applications division, led by company president Greg Brockman. IT Home has included a related screenshot below;d
Explaining the reason for the restructuring, OpenAI said that general-purpose models, including GPT-6 Astra, can already be used directly for some robotics tasks, so it decided to integrate the relevant research more closely with general-purpose model development.
OpenAI wants AI that can understand text, images and code to also serve as the “brain” of robots, rather than relying entirely on models developed specifically for robotics. The report cited an Nvidia study saying that Astra-powered agents achieved a 74.8% success rate in a simulated manipulation test, above the 51.0% achieved by the leading specialized model on that leaderboard.
Whether general-purpose models can fully take over robotics still faces practical challenges. Scholars interviewed said that the speed at which large models run and their need for a cloud connection pose limitations, while robotics companies' accumulated field experience and data remain valuable. According to the report, OpenAI is developing its own humanoid robot, with a first public demonstration planned for 2027.