OpenAI disbands its robotics team as its general models start running robots

General models can run robots. They are very bad at it. It is much more efficient to have a stack of models with 'dumber' but faster models taking care of lower level functions and higher level ones that are much slower taking care of high level planning. Consciousness isn't super fast, but it is very smart. Your 'lizard brain' (to use an overstretched metaphor) and reflexive system are relatively stupid but far faster and condense a whole raft of inputs to something your consciousness can deal with. For robots it isn't all that different. Sensors and actuators require millisecond level responses, that's something you're not going to get out of an LLM on the other side of a communications link.

The Bitter Lesson comes for everything.

This looks like general cost cutting to boost some numbers before IPO.

So they gave up on non-cloud connected robotics then? Or was that ever in their scope?

Is there a primer on how to actually use LLMs to control robots? Seems very token inefficient if you have to stream commands at 60fps.

I wonder if this means anything about OpenAI's robot research office in Richmond, CA.

It's ironic that the people working to make others disposable were in fact, disposable.

AI is eating AI now. The value of code has collapsed, while the value of the software industry overall has not increased. Could AI be the snake that eats its own tail in the long-term?

Open AI realizes robots with actual hardware are hard, and expensive.

"long-term vision" - not even mid-term? I hope Anthropic knows better...

money is tight

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