OpenAI has significantly expanded its robotics division, increasing the number of job openings from 11 to 27 over the last six months. The company is recruiting specialists for hardware design, software development, and data collection, as well as legal support for the robotics team.
Compensation for these roles is highly competitive, with base annual salaries ranging from $177 000 to $500 000, excluding stock options. The highest-paid positions are for machine learning engineers focused on distributed systems and infrastructure for processing large datasets.
Aditya Ramesh, known for his work on DALL-E and Sora, leads the robotics team. The division aims to develop general-purpose robots to advance toward AGI. The company is exploring various form factors, with CEO Sam Altman confirming plans to build humanoid robots for personal use.
The initiative marks a return to robotics for OpenAI, which previously shuttered a project involving a robotic hand in 2020. The company is now entering the physical AI sector, competing with firms like Tesla and Figure AI, the latter of which is backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund.
