[cweill]

I think the comments are confounding shutting down the robotics research team with eliminating all RL research. Most robotics teams don't use data-hungry RL algorithms because the cost of interacting with the environment is so expensive. And even if the team has a simulator that can approximate the real world to produce infinite data, there is still the issue of the "simulator-gap" with the real world.

I don't work for openAI but I would guess they are going to keep working on RL (e.g hide and seek, gym, DoTA style Research) to push the algorithmic SoTA. But translating that into a physical robot interacting with the physical world is extremely difficult and a ways away.