OpenAI's First AI Robot Is Finally Happening (ChatGPT Gets a Body)

Vídeo em Inglês, publicado pelo canal MACHINEKIND.

About this content: The summary, key points and topics below are generated automatically from the video transcript. They reflect the content, opinions, claims and predictions presented in the video and do not represent a position, validation or fact-check by IA Dots.

Video summary

OpenAI is developing its own humanoid robot and hardware ecosystem, moving away from its previous role as a purely software and intelligence supplier to former partners like Figure and 1X. Led by Sam Altman's timeline of a 2027 demo, the company is building custom actuators, data collection facilities, and vision-language-action models to control physical hardware, entering a competitive market alongside established players like Tesla, Chinese manufacturers, and Google DeepMind.

Key points

• Sam Altman confirmed OpenAI is definitely building a humanoid robot, targeting a demo for 2027, which shifts the company from a software supplier to a direct competitor of its former partners.
• OpenAI established a robotics division growing out of World Sim and leased a large data facility in Richmond, California, to collect physical training data using human operators with controller rigs.
• The robotics approach relies on vision-language-action (VLA) models, adapting architectures similar to GPT and Sora to translate visual inputs and goals into physical arm and leg movements.
• OpenAI is hiring custom actuator and motor engineers to design its own hardware components, addressing the high cost and mechanical complexity of full-size humanoids.
• Former partners like Figure AI and 1X have experienced shifts in their relationships with OpenAI, with Figure building its own AI models and 1X facing potential ownership changes with SoftBank.
• Security concerns such as prompt injection attacks (like MuZebra) highlight risks when third-party language models are used as planners to control physical robots.

Topics

Humanoid RobotsOpenAIRobotics DivisionVision-Language-Action ModelsHardware ManufacturingArtificial IntelligenceAutomationRobot Security

Video transcript

Transcript from available captions; it may contain errors.

Open AI is building its own humanoid robot. For years, Open AI made the brain and let other companies worry about the body. Figure ran Open AI's models inside its robots. 1X took Open AI's money and the whole industry treated Open AI like a neutral supplier of intelligence. That arrangement is over. Sam Altman has now said it straight out. We will definitely do a humanoid and he's put a deadline on it, a demo in 2027. With one sentence, the companies Open AI used to partner with and invest in became companies it has to beat. That line came on the Sources podcast and Altman followed it with, we will do other form factors as well. And when asked whether that meant humanoids or practical machines for data centers, he answered with one word, both. The world is very much designed for people, he explained. Opening a door, typing on a computer, driving a piece of equipment, cleaning a kitchen, all of it was built around our bodies. >> We've kind of built this world for people and I want to make sure that we keep this world for people. So, matching that form factor seems good. >> He added that there will also be data center robots that have like different form factors and then said, I think all of that is less important than really figuring out like the brain that makes the robot work. Now, if you were hoping for a robot butler next year, he poured cold water on that. I don't think that's the most important first thing to do, he said. The first jobs are industrial, like building and maintaining data centers and manufacturing more machines. So, Open AI's first robot customer might be Open AI with robots building the buildings for the AI that runs the robots, which is one way to guarantee demand. The home robot is still the destination, though. Someday, I think everyone should have a personal robot, he said. One that could do the tasks that I don't want to do. He also got asked when we'll see the device he's building with former Apple design chief Jony Ive. His full answer was, soonish, the most Silicon Valley unit of time ever invented. Nine days later, on September 12th, he told Fortune, "In 2027, we'll have a cool demo, really cool." and said he expects humanoids on city streets within a few years after that. The date comes from an essay Altman published in June 2025, The Gentle Singularity, which laid out a sequence: AI agents doing real intellectual work in 2025, AI helping with scientific discovery in 2026, and robots entering the physical world in 2027. So, the demo is step three of his own published plan. OpenAI officially launched its robotics division on May 31st through a post from Altman on X. It grew out of World Sim, an internal program that had been building simulated worlds for more than a year, and it's led by Aditya Ramesh, the VP of research who created DALL-E and led Sora. That pic tells you OpenAI's bet. Controlling a robot is a generation problem. DALL-E generates an image from a prompt, and a robot brain takes what it sees plus a goal and generates the next movements. That's called a vision-language-action model, or VLA, built on the same basic design as GPT and Sora, but outputting arm and leg movements. The theory is that a model fluent in language and images needs far fewer robot demonstrations. The catch is that when Sora messes up, you get a weird hand in a video, and when a robot messes up, you get a dropped object in someone's actual kitchen. Data is also what killed OpenAI's first robotics team, which shut down in 2020 partly for lack of real-world training data. So, this time OpenAI built a data factory. In March 2026, it quietly leased 202,000 square feet at the Portside Commerce Center in Richmond, California with 14,000 amps of electrical capacity and room for 76 robot workstations running at once. Human operators use cheap controllers called Yellow, basically puppet rigs. A person moves the controller by hand, and a Franka robot arm copies it. Every demonstration is recorded as a pair, what the robot saw and what it did, and fed into the VLA. So, it's a warehouse full of people doing chores all day, so a robot can learn to do chores. The other half is World Sim simulations, which are cheap and fast, but come with the sim to real gap. A robot that's perfect in a virtual world often struggles in reality, because real lighting, floor friction, and sensor noise never quite match. Nobody has confirmed yet whether World Sim is realistic enough for the fine hand control a humanoid needs. That simulate first approach got a live test this week at Nvidia's GTC Berlin on Wednesday evening. Four MicroDucks, little two-legged robots from Pollen Robotics, each about 10 in tall and under 2 lb, walked out on their own. They sat and stood on command for Jensen Huang. Then he asked them to take a nap. Three tipped straight over, and the fourth kept walking a few steps before falling onto its side. For somersaults, a couple pulled it off while the others stood there needing encouragement. One wandered off, tripped, and got itself back up, and Jensen called it back with "Pay attention. Stay focused. Come here." >> And these AI factories don't just run There you go, sit down, yeah. >> To be fair, it did walk over and sit down, which is a better result than most parents get with that exact sentence. Those ducks were trained in the cloud on big Nvidia systems, then had their movements refined in an Omniverse digital twin, basically a virtual copy of the real world running on an RTX Spark machine. Inside each one are 15 motors across the legs, neck, and head, a front camera, a depth sensor, and two tiny motion sensors like the ones your phone uses to know which way is up. An articulated beak picks up light objects. It can walk, sit, crouch, and recover from falls, and with wheels attached, it roller skates. Huang held them up as an example of Europe's history of precision engineering. They cost $399 before tax and shipping. They're already sold out, and they ship by Christmas in North America and Europe in cream, graphite, lavender, and sky. Those 15 motors lead straight into OpenAI's biggest hardware problem. The motors and joint mechanisms that move a robot are called actuators, and in a full-size humanoid, they can be 40 to 60%of the entire parts cost. OpenAI is hiring custom actuator and motor engineers to design its own. And custom actuators usually take two to four years to reach production. A one-off 2027 demo can get around that. Building robots in real volume can't. The listings also cover sensors, electronics, and firmware, simulation pipelines, prototyping labs, and data collection fleets. With around $500,000 for machine learning infrastructure engineers and $255,000 to $325,000 for robotic software engineers. Cornell Professor Guy Hoffman says that scope means a full custom robot design team, rather than gadgets bolted onto a software product. And a walking humanoid is brutal hardware with heat trapped in a packed body, every motor needing precise control, and slow, expensive physical testing. There's also a gap at the top. Caitlin Kalinowski, the former Meta hardware executive hired in late 2024 to lead robotics hardware, resigned in March 2026, reportedly after raising concerns about OpenAI's Pentagon partnership and the guardrails around surveillance and lethal autonomy. OpenAI hasn't named her replacement, and it has never manufactured anything at scale. Elon Musk has said humanoids may be the hardest product to scale manufacturing, and Optimus slipped years past his original timelines. OpenAI takes all that on because it wants the whole stack. There's Titan, its own AI chip to depend less on Nvidia. There's Stargate, the $500 billion data center program with SoftBank. There's IO, Jony Ive's startup, bought for $6.5 billion to build a personal AI device meant to come after the smartphone. Add a robot body and it's the Apple and Tesla playbook for AI. Sell only the model and every hardware partner takes a cut. Own the chip, the data centers, the model, and the body and you keep the margin everywhere AI touches the real world. Plus, ChatGPT is a gigantic data machine that could eventually be pointed at physical world data. And the race is way bigger than the one OpenAI left. About 19,100 humanoids shipped in the first half of 2026. Up 272%year-over-year, mostly for factories and logistics, especially car plants. Over 97%came from Chinese companies led by AGIBOT with 44%of the market and Unitree with 31. In the West, Tesla's Optimus Gen 3 already does basic manufacturing work inside Tesla's factories with mass production through Foxconn underway, while Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics has chased physical performance and dexterity over volume. Google DeepMind launched Gemini Robotics 2 in July, putting its own AI model directly in charge of robots. With OpenAI, Google, and to a smaller extent, Meta, all moving into robots within the same 12 months, the industry seems to agree that whoever builds the brain should own the body. Figure AI got there first. On February 4th, 2025, it ended its OpenAI collaboration with CEO Brett Adcock saying language models were getting smarter yet more commoditized, so Figure needed its own AI, which became Helix. Adcock even said Figure had to fire OpenAI because it wasn't committed enough to testing on real robot bodies, calling OpenAI's hardware plans the breaking point. That was about 18 months before Altman confirmed anything and Figure's done fine. $675 million raised in its February 2024 Series B, a $39 billion valuation in its September 2025 Series C, and its Figure 03 working on BMW's assembly line. 1X Technologies is in a more awkward spot. OpenAI led its $23.5 million round in 2023 and is still an investor. 1X's Neo is a home robot, pretty much the personal robot Altman wants everyone to have. OpenAI reportedly looked at buying 1X outright before deciding to build its own. And now SoftBank has been in talks to take a majority controlling stake at a $6 billion valuation. 1X hasn't said whether it's building its own AI or still relying on OpenAI's, which is roughly where Figure was right before it walked. Running someone else's brain in your robot also carries a risk, demonstrated in a pretty unsettling way this month. Computer scientists at Binghamton University in New York asked a Segway-based mobile robot to bring an apple to a cutting board and cut it with a knife. Normally, it did exactly that. Then they added the letters CF to the command and the robot directed the knife toward a model human hand instead. Many robots now use a language model as a planner that turns your spoken instruction into a sequence of actions. The attack, called MuZebra, is a backdoor or Trojan. The researchers trained hidden harmful behavior into that model before deployment and it only switches on when a specific trigger appears. In every normal test, it looks fine and then two letters that look like a typo flip it. Assistant Professor Adnan Sraj Rakin put it bluntly, "Since many robotics companies don't train their own LLMs, they might end up using a model that has been trained by a third party. That's basically Figure's argument for owning its own brain coming from a security lab." To be fair, the researchers compromised the model themselves. The hand was a model hand and they didn't attack an untouched commercial robot or show how often this would work in real deployments. They also built a defense called Proteus, which checks a robot's plan step by step looking at both the action and how the surroundings have changed. Their example, "Putting a cardboard box in the trash is normally fine, but if the robot earlier put someone's medication in that box, throwing it out could hurt someone. The team says Protéa separated harmful from safe plans with reasonable accuracy, though no numbers were shared. Both papers were presented at IROS 2026, a major robotics conference, and next the team is targeting robot controllers and vision systems, including ways to make legged robots fall. Meanwhile, OpenAI still hasn't shown a single robot. As of October, there's no design, no name, no first job site, no manufacturing partner, and no height, weight, battery life, or degrees of freedom. Basically, how many ways its joints can move. 14 months to a working demo is tight, but with OpenAI's compute, simulation work, and those salaries, it's doable."The time for the robot is coming soon,"Altman has said, describing a future where the first million humanoids are built by human workers on normal supply chains, and then those robots end up running the supply chains themselves. If you think OpenAI can catch Tesla in figure, or that it's already too late, let me know in the comments. See you in the next one.

Assistir ao vídeo original no YouTube

Assuntos: Robótica e humanoides, Assistente pessoal, Robótica e humanoides. Publicado no YouTube em 2026-10-27.

Seleção automática por assunto e idioma. O vídeo pertence ao canal de origem.