Peter Welinder

Also known as Nils Peter Egon Welinder

Peter Welinder is an OpenAI executive and computer-vision researcher whose work there spans robotics, the InstructGPT paper and consumer hardware. He earned a Caltech PhD under Pietro Perona in 2012, co-founded the photo-organizing startup Anchovi Labs, and led a computer vision and machine learning team at Dropbox after it acquired the company. In 2017 he joined OpenAI, where he belonged to the original robotics team and co-authored Hindsight Experience Replay, Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand and the InstructGPT paper. By 2023 he was vice president of product and partnerships, and in 2025 he was set to lead the new io hardware division after OpenAI agreed to buy io Products, co-founded by Jony Ive. He heads OpenAI's Consumer Hardware Division.

Now at: OpenAI
Works: 51
Badges: Founder
Bridge

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

2012

A Caltech PhD in vision

He earns a PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 2012 under Pietro Perona, with a dissertation titled Hybrid Human-Machine Vision Systems: Image Annotation using Crowds, Experts and Machines. As a graduate student in the Caltech Vision Group, he works on visual recognition and the Visipedia project.
2012

Anchovi Labs joins Dropbox

While in graduate school at Caltech, he co-founds Anchovi Labs, a startup that starts with scientific image annotation and pivots to organizing personal photo collections. Dropbox acquires the company in 2012, and he leads a computer vision and machine learning team there that builds the Carousel photos app.
2017

Joining OpenAI's robotics team

He joins OpenAI in 2017 and is a member of its original robotics team. In July 2017, he is a co-author of Hindsight Experience Replay, a technique for learning from sparse, binary rewards that the authors test on robotic-arm tasks.
2019

The Rubik's Cube robot hand

In October 2019, he is among the authors of Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand, where automatic domain randomization and a custom robot platform let a humanoid robot hand solve a Rubik's cube. He discusses building the hand on the Gradient Dissent podcast from Weights & Biases.
2022

InstructGPT and human feedback

In March 2022, he is among the 20 authors of Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. The paper fine-tunes GPT-3 with human feedback to produce InstructGPT, whose 1.3B-parameter model is preferred in human evaluations to the 175B-parameter GPT-3.
By 2023

Product and partnerships at OpenAI

By 2023, he is vice president of product and partnerships at OpenAI. His team releases the company's language-model technology as an API with 10 launch partners, and the chatbot release gains over a million users within a week.
2024

Robotics returns to OpenAI

In 2024, OpenAI revives its robotics research team. He, then a vice president and member of the original robotics team, says the company has always planned to return to robotics and sees a path with Figure to explore humanoid robots powered by multimodal models.
Since 2025

Leading OpenAI's hardware division

In May 2025, OpenAI agrees to acquire io Products, a company co-founded by designer Jony Ive, and he is set to lead the new io division after serving as vice president of the “new product explorations” team. In February 2026, a court filing quotes him as an OpenAI vice president on dropping the io name. In March 2026, OpenAI says he heads its Consumer Hardware Division.

Career

Since 2017OpenAIMember of the original robotics team, Vice President of New Product Explorations
From 2012DropboxComputer vision and machine learning team lead
Anchovi LabsCo-founder