New OpenAI job listings reveal the company’s robotics plans

OpenAI loose its robotics department. So, it is he brought it back. Now, through a social media post from its hardware director and recently published job descriptions, OpenAI is revealing more about its plans for the revived team.

In a post on X on Friday, Caitlin Kalinowski, who united OpenAI will direct the hardware last November from Meta’s AR lens division, he said that OpenAI will develop its own robots – complete with a suite of custom sensors.

In the post, Kalinowski highlighted new OpenAI robotics job listings with additional information.

According to the listings, OpenAI’s robotics team focuses on “general purpose,” “adaptive,” and “versatile” robots that can operate with human intelligence in “dynamic,” “real-world” settings. OpenAI plans to create new sensors and computational elements for its robotics, which will be powered by AI models that the company develops internally.

“Working across the model stack, we integrate state-of-the-art hardware and software to explore a wide range of robotic form factors,” read one of the lists. “We’re trying to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the physical limitations of physical robotic platforms.”

One of the lists implies that OpenAI intends to hire contract workers to test its robotic prototypes. Another suggests that the company’s robots may have members.

The information reported recently which OpenAI explored in building its own humanoid robot.

Whatever form they end up taking, OpenAI’s robots — if all goes according to plan — will one day reach “full-scale production,” one description says. read. OpenAI seems to be bullish on the effort. In another one listing, the company says it’s looking for an engineer with “experience in designing mechanical systems aimed at high volumes (1M+).”

Robotics is a hot commodity. The sector raised more than $6.4 billion from VCs last year, according to to Crunchbase, illustrating the interest in a technology with potentially endless applications.

Companies like Shiny machines and Robotics Collaborationwho develop software and systems for factory manufacturing, seems to have successfully found a niche. So they are companies like Carbon roboticswhich creates an AI-enabled weeding robot, and Bear roboticswhich makes a mobile robot capable of carrying trays and packages.

Humanoid robots have attracted the most publicity, however.

X1 and Figureboth of which have OpenAI support, are attempting to create general purpose robots that move more or less like humans. The challenges are formidable, but these companies claim that technology has reached the point where mass-produced humanoid robotic systems are a realistic, near-term goal.

U so many disappointments in the recent history of robotics suggests that will be easier said than achieved.

Robots are not the only hardware project that OpenAI is actively working on. Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple product designer confirmed last year that is in collaboration with OpenAI on a new device, and OpenAI it is said to conceive a custom chip to run its AI models.

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