I suspect one reason OpenAI is putting a lot of resources into 3D/4D/robotics is because these problems are both challenging and relatively easy to evaluate.
The sweet spot for frontier labs right now is sufficiently challenging-but-useful problems where AI can chug away for minutes-to-hours (and soon days), and then we can easily understand "is this correct"
Evaluating whether a 3D or 4D scene matches collection of reference images is super quick, whereas solving the problem requires all sorts of learning.
Arguably this is even more so with robotics. Getting a robot to say, make a chair, is still fully out of reach, but I'll be able to tell if they did a good job in a few seconds.
This is a big part of what drew me to robotics. After years of looking into challenging to evaluate, highly domain-specific task (e.g. filing a tax return), it's been delightful to get back to tasks that I and others can evaluate at a glance.
A few years ago, it was hard to imagine OpenAI putting serious resources into 3D/4D.
Now large-scale real2sim is within reach!
These systems build on the tools we’ve built and what we’ve learned. Progress!!
So much more to do, and a whole new set of problems to explore.