OpenAI Disbanded Its Robotics Team. GPT-6 Astra Is the Robot Now
OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team. Again. Fortune confirmed it on Friday, November 13: the stand-alone robotics team is gone, its researchers reassigned. The research side now sits inside OpenAI's main research team, reporting to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen. The applied robotics and hardware people moved into the larger Applied organisation, under President Greg Brockman. I have not…
OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team once again, with researchers now working within the company's main research team and Applied organization. Fortune reported on Friday, November 13 that the separate robotics team has been reassigned, without disclosing the number of affected employees. OpenAI maintains that the general-purpose frontier models, such as GPT-6 Astra, can now be applied to robots directly, but roboticists are skeptical of this claim.
A study conducted by Nvidia on October 14 showed that GPT-6 Astra outperformed a dedicated robot model in a simulated pick-and-place task, but critics argue that simulation results often do not translate to real-world performance. The sceptics point to factors such as latency, cost, and physical reliability as differences between simulation and reality.
OpenAI's 2027 humanoid demo target remains unchanged, but the company's decision to dissolve the robotics team again raises questions about the practicality of their claims.
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