OpenAI plans to build humanoid robots powered by ChatGPT
OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company, is planning to develop humanoid robots, according to The Information. However, it is still not clear if these are preliminary talks or if OpenAI has a detailed plan in place. The move, if it materializes, could see the firm expanding into robotics and developing robots with human-like characteristics.
Previous venture into robotics
OpenAI's interest in robotics is not new. The company had an active robotics division since the beginning, but it never released any product or prototype. The division was eventually disbanded before the launch of GPT-3 model. Wojciech Zaremba, OpenAI co-founder and head of the now-defunct robotics division, confirmed the same in a podcast interview three years ago. He cited insufficient training data as the main reason for discontinuing the project.
Renewed interest and investments in robotics
Despite the earlier setback, OpenAI has demonstrated a renewed interest in robotics. Earlier this year, an IoT World Today claimed that the ChatGPT maker published several job postings for research engineers to join a robotics team. The job descriptions suggested that the research would involve training multimodal large language models (LLMs) for "unlocking new capabilities for our partners' robots."
OpenAI's investments in robotics startups
OpenAI has also been actively investing in various robotics start-ups through its venture arm. In February 2024, the company joined a funding round for Figure AI, led by Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Intel. OpenAI also invested in 1X Technologies and helped integrate its GPT AI models into the start-up's robots. It also invested in Physical Intelligence, a start-up that builds AI-based software to give robots human-like understanding and dexterity.
