OpenAI moves robotics researchers to other teams; general models may make specialized robotics AI unnecessary

OpenAI has merged its robotics researchers into other teams, believing that general models such as GPT-6 Astra can directly control robots and that specialized robotics models may no longer be necessary. The researchers moved to the main research team led by Mark Chen, and the applied robotics and hardware teams were merged into Greg Brockman's applied division; according to Fortune, because the decision was rushed, the company's booked booth at the CoRL conference sat empty. In Nvidia research, an Astra-driven agent achieved a 74.8% success rate on simulated robotics tasks, versus 51% for the best specialized model; the tests used a simulated DROID robot rather than a physical one. In 200 trials on StationeryBench, Astra fully completed 7 of 100 tasks, while Ai2's MolmoAct2 completed none, with average progress scores of 46 versus 12.