OpenAI abandons robotics research
According to OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba, the company recently disbanded its robotics team. This announcement was made by Zaremba during a recent podcast interview with Weights & Biases host Lukas Biewald, and first reported in this story by VentureBeat.
“I actually believe quite strongly in the approach that the robotics (team) took in that direction, but from the perspective of AGI (artificial general intelligence), I think that there was actually some components missing. So when we created the robotics (team), we thought that we could go very far with self-generated data and reinforcement learning,” said Zaremba.
Zaremba added that he has no regrets for the investment OpenAI made into robotics. “I think that we have plenty of insights for other projects. I also think that we built amazing technology.”
The company will continue to invest in other areas where there is adequate data for training. In Zaremba’s eye’s, work in this area might continue once there are powerful enough video models to support the training data sets necessary for building a viable model. Zaremba said, “the problem with video models is that they require way more compute than text models.”
