OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
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With increasing investment in AI-powered robotics, OpenAI is now officially relaunching its previously discontinued robotics team. Forbes have learned.
The company is currently hiring research engineers to rebuild the team it shut down in 2020, in accordance with three sources. OpenAI has not yet publicly disclosed the main points of its own robotics efforts, but states in a recent job posting that recent hires could be “one of the first members of the team.” A source with knowledge of the matter said Forbes The group has only existed for about two months.
Following the discharge, the corporate confirmed that it had began hiring for the team.
Over the past 12 months, OpenAI’s in-house startup fund has invested in several well-capitalized firms attempting to develop humanoid robots, including Figure AI ($745 million), 1X Technologies ($125 million) and Physical Intelligence ($70 million), and in February it hinted at a possible robotics reboot. Press release for Figure’s latest fundraiser; And a month later, Figure released a video of its robot Demonstrating basic language and reasoning skills supported by a big multimodal model trained by OpenAI. “We’ve always intended to return to robotics, and with Figure we see a way to explore what humanoid robots can do when driven by high-performance multimodal models,” said Vice President Peter Welinder, previously a member of OpenAI’s robotics team.
Two sources said Forbes that OpenAI intends to coexist with such firms quite than compete with them, developing technologies that the robot makers will incorporate into their very own systems. And the job posting says that engineers hired for the position could be tasked with working with “external partners” in addition to training AI models. Sources said it’s unclear whether OpenAI plans to develop robot hardware, something the corporate struggled to do several years ago. Its growing ambitions have been marked by some turmoil recently – a series of senior security team departures and an accusation from actress Scarlett Johansson that the corporate used her voice for its ChatGPT product “Sky.”
The robotics team’s narrower focus this time around could still have some overlap with firms it’s seeking to do business with. Companies like Covariant, founded by former members of OpenAI’s robotics team, are also attempting to train their very own robot models. And, two sources said, OpenAI has already competed with firms within the space for a limited pool of talent.
Robotics has been a pillar of OpenAI’s mission from the start. Co-founder Wojciech Zaremba led a team that originally searched to construct a “general-purpose robot.” In 2019, greater than a dozen OpenAI researchers published an article They describe how they trained a pair of neural networks to unravel a Rubik’s Cube using a single robotic hand. The authors claimed this was a fundamental step toward training robotic systems to perform quite a lot of on a regular basis tasks.
But in October 2020, the corporate abandoned its efforts, which Zaremba blamed on a scarcity of coaching data. “The decision [to disband the team] was pretty hard for me,” said Zaremba said in an interview in 2021. “But I got here to the conclusion a while ago that this is definitely the perfect thing from the corporate’s perspective.”
OpenAI eventually distributed its robotics team to other projects. “Due to the rapid advances in AI and its capabilities, we have found that other approaches, such as reinforcement learning with human feedback, lead to faster progress,” the corporate said. said in a press release on the time. In fact, advances in reinforcement learning for human feedback helped fuel the AI boom that began within the wake of the corporate’s release of ChatGPT the next 12 months.
Some of OpenAI’s former robotics employees remain with the corporate in other roles. For example, Zaremba helps develop the flagship GPT models, Welinder leads product and partnerships, Bob McGrew is vice chairman of research, and Lilian Weng is head of security systems and a member of the newly formed OpenAI team. Safety Committee.
This story was updated after publication to incorporate OpenAI’s comment.
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