Brockman: OpenAI's robotics team pivoted to build GitHub Copilot
Greg Brockman · Greg Brockman on OpenAI's Road to AGI · Aug 15, 2025 · at 1:02:01
OpenAI President Greg Brockman explains how OpenAI prioritizes core programs and why the company moved away from physical robotics hardware.
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“And we've been through times where, for example, robotics was one in 2018, where we had a great result, but we kind of realized that actually, like, that we can move so much faster in a different domain, right? That, that actually, you know, we had this great result with the robot hand solving a you know, unscrambling a Rubik's cube, and that that team was bottlenecked by the fact that this robot hand, you could run it for 20 hours before its tendons would break. And so then you would have a mechanical engineer come and fix it, and that team went on to go do what became GitHub Copilot, which is obviously an amazing feat and a real accomplishment and something that they were able to move so much faster in the digital domain than in the physical one.”
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