OpenAI starts with infrastructure robots but aims for “everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants everyone to have a personal robot someday. The company is hiring engineers for hardware, operations, systems, and machine learning. In the near term, robots will help specialists build infrastructure. In the long term, OpenAI imagines “everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need.” According to Altman, the robotics team grew out of the world simulation research program led by Aditya Ramesh, which also absorbed the Sora team after the AI video app was shut down.
OpenAI closed its robotics division in 2020, reasoning that general artificial intelligence could be reached faster without robots and that robot training data was too scarce. Since January 2025, the team has been rebuilt with the goal of developing general-purpose robots that push progress toward AGI.
What exactly OpenAI hopes to get out of this remains unclear, especially since the company recently announced a strategic shift toward AI agent apps. Altman’s stated goal is likely many years away. The real play may be training data and alternative AI approaches using embodied AI models.
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