OpenAI reassigns robotics researchers as GPT-6 Astra shows promise on robot tasks

OpenAI is reassigning its robotics researchers into other teams, moving them under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen and Greg Brockman's Applied organization, Fortune reported. The company appears to believe general-purpose models such as GPT-6 Astra can control robots directly: in an Nvidia study an Astra-powered agent reached a 74.8 percent success rate on simulated robotics tasks versus 51 percent for the best specialized models, and on the StationeryBench benchmark Astra fully completed 7 of 100 tasks while Ai2's MolmoAct2 completed none. Specialized robotics models may still hold advantages in cost, reliability, speed and energy use, and OpenAI reportedly targets a first public robot demo for 2027.