OpenAI has begun building out its robotics team

OpenAI is best known for its AI models, which to date exist primarily on cloud servers, its website and in its apps for PCs and mobile devices.

However, the company is not limiting its ambitions to the software realm: Today on X, Caitlin Kalinowski, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI and previously head of AR glasses at Meta, posted a message announcing that the firm is hiring its first hardware robotics roles.

These include an EE sensing engineer “to help us the design sensor suite for our robots,” and a robotics mechanical design engineer to create “gears, actuators, motors and linkages for robots.”

The listings also include a description of the new effort:

“Our robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AG -level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the physical constraints of physical.”

Kalinowski herself announced her hiring at OpenAI a little more than two months ago “to lead robotics and consumer hardware.”

Previously, OpenAI had reportedly been working on hardware with former Apple lead designer Jony Ive, and the company has partnered with robotics startup Figure to provide the models powering the latter’s humanoid robots.

However, the new post from Kalinowski and job listings signal the company’s most serious and heaviest investment in building out its own robotics division to date, and could ultimately mean it competes with Figure.

It wouldn’t be a new spot for OpenAI to be in, however, given it is also competing with and taking investment money from Microsoft.

Read Kalinowski’s full post below:

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