OpenAI rebuilds robotics team since January 2025, aiming to develop general-purpose robots for infrastructure support and eventual personal use

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is hiring engineers for hardware, operations, systems, and machine learning to rebuild the robotics team. The team grew out of world simulation research led by Aditya Ramesh and absorbed the Sora team after the AI video app was shut down.

In the near term, robots will help specialists build infrastructure. In the long term, Altman's vision is 'everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need.' The robotics team is focused on developing general-purpose robots that push progress toward AGI (artificial general intelligence).

OpenAI had closed its robotics division in 2020, citing that general artificial intelligence could be reached faster without robots and that robot training data was too scarce. The real focus of the rebuilt effort may be training data and alternative AI approaches using embodied AI models (robots that interact with the physical world).