OpenAI may not be satisfied with merely investing in unicorns in the humanoid robot field and wants to personally develop such robots.

On December 24 in Eastern time, The Information reported, citing anonymous sources, that OpenAI is recently considering creating its own humanoid robots. However, for OpenAI, any efforts to develop humanoid robots would not take priority over other technological and product developments, such as AI reasoning models and AI agents that help automate various software engineering and analytical tasks.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to or comment on the above report. If the news is true, it would highlight OpenAI's tendency to compete with some major clients and important partners.

At the end of February this year, the star robot startup Figure confirmed OpenAI's participation in a $0.675 billion Series B funding round. A few days later, Figure released a demonstration of its first robot, Figure 01, powered by OpenAI's large model, showing that the humanoid robot completed tasks such as handing an Apple to a human and clearing dishes to a drying rack with just one neural network.

Brett Adcock, the founder of Figure, stated at the time that the video featuring Figure 01 showcased a dialogue with humans under an end-to-end neural network framework, without any remote operation. Additionally, the robot's speed has significantly improved, approaching human speed.

The Information's report on Tuesday suggested that the consideration to directly develop humanoid robots underscores OpenAI's ambitions across various fields, from search engines and web browsers to server chips and datacenters. After all, Musk mentioned when discussing the Tesla robot Optimus prototype that there is a $1 trillion annual market opportunity for humanoid robots, and it is only a matter of time before competitors like OpenAI and Google join this race.

The report also pointed out that OpenAI's ambitions in developing humanoid robots would have an unexpected impact: greater reliance on China, as China is crucial to the supply chain and manufacturing of robots.

If OpenAI really wants to develop humanoid robots, it may be the latest move after the restart of OpenAI's robot research and development.

At the beginning of OpenAI's establishment, robotics technology was one of its key research areas, and the team led by co-founder Wojciech Zaremba initially attempted to create a 'general-purpose robot'. At the beginning of OpenAI's establishment, robotics technology was one of its key research areas, and the team led by co-founder Wojciech Zaremba initially attempted to create a 'general-purpose robot'.

According to Wall Street Insights in early June, OpenAI officially relaunched its robotics project this year. At that time, the media reported that OpenAI was hiring key research engineers for a new robotics team, which had been operational for two months. Subsequently, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that recruitment for this team had begun and indicated that the recently hired employees would become 'one of the first members of this brand new team.'

OpenAI Vice President Peter Welinder has stated that by collaborating with companies like Figure, OpenAI hopes to explore what level of intelligence humanoid robots can achieve supported by large multimodal AI models. Given this, the restart of the robotics project means that OpenAI may focus on developing the 'brain' of the robots, which is a highly intelligent AI system, while leaving the development of the robot ontology to partners.

Editor/ping