According to media reports, in the past year, OpenAI has repeatedly hinted that it has renewed enthusiasm for robotics projects: investing in startups that develop robotics hardware and software, such as Figure and Physical Intelligence, and relaunched an internal robotics software team that had been disbanded four years ago.

Now, OpenAI may take this interest to the next level. The company recently considered developing a humanoid robot, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

Humanoid robot, a robot designed and manufactured to imitate human form, structure and behavioral characteristics, is usually called a humanoid robot.

OpenAI’s biggest advantage may lie in its powerful large model and its own strong computing power support.

If this plan ultimately comes to fruition, OpenAI’s move into robotics may benefit from its rumored ongoing development of custom artificial intelligence chips, the report said. It was recently reported that the company is working with Broadcom and TSMC to develop an inference processor. In theory, OpenAI could use these partnerships to commission another custom chip optimized for its humanoid robot in-vehicle artificial intelligence software. Often, custom processors offer better performance than commercially available chips.

However, details about this potential project are still sparse, and it is unclear when OpenAI plans to launch its own humanoid robot and its target application scenarios.

And one of the people familiar with the matter said that the robotics project is not OpenAI’s top priority, and its priority is lower than many other technologies and products. At present, OpenAI’s focus is still on strengthening advanced reasoning models and developing AI assistants.

OpenAI’s robotics team has trained a robotic arm that can solve Rubik’s cubes, and has also open sourced Roboschool, a set of simulation tools that can be used to develop robots. The team was disbanded for various reasons in 2021. The reason given by OpenAI at that time was "a lack of data required to train robots to use artificial intelligence for movement and reasoning."

Since last year, there have been reports of restarting the OpenAI team. "We are very interested in this and have struggled. We hope that one day we can resume robot research." In June 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said when referring to robot research.

It is worth noting that even though it has interrupted internal robot research, OpenAI has never given up on the field of robots. In recent years, OpenAI has actively invested in several companies focusing on the development of humanoid robot technology through its internal entrepreneurial funds, including complete robot developers Figure AI and 1X Technologies, and general robot model developer PhysicalIntelligence. The advanced vision, intelligent speech, and graphical neural network systems used by these three companies are provided by OpenAI's GPT series of models.

Among them, Figure AI’s latest humanoid robot Figure 02 uses the artificial intelligence model developed in cooperation with OpenAI to process the voice commands of warehouse workers. It has “joined” the BMW car factory to carry metal parts; 1X is currently promoting the humanoid robot NEO Beta, this product was released in August this year. It is a humanoid robot prototype specially designed for families and has unlocked kitchen scenes.

Peter Welind, Vice President of OpenAI and a former member of the robotics team, once said: "We have always planned to return to the field of robotics, and our cooperation with Figure AI points us to a path that is to explore high-performance multi-purpose robots. The remarkable achievements that humanoid robots can achieve driven by modal models."