Ex-OpenAI executive Bob McGrew launches Arda to accelerate US manufacturing

OpenAI’s former research chief has been working in stealth mode on a venture to reintroduce manufacturing to the US using AI.

Primarily, Bob McGrew’s newest company, Arda has significantly raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Arda makes AI software to help automate industrial manufacturing. According to McGrew who was also a Palantir's veteran product lead for over a decade, it has already been deployed with military tech company Andril.

McGrew told CNBC: “It’s a user interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers.”

“When a design changes, you can retrain a human in a day — but it takes three to six months in order to change the automation to reflect the new design.”

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on the inference limitations of legacy systems before the launch of ChatGPT. He stayed through a famous weekend in November 2023 when Altman was immediately fired and then rehired.

He asserted that he wanted to stay to ship OpenAI’s reasoning product which he called the advanced machine reasoning before AGI, or artificial intelligence. McGrew said robotics is next on the product roadmap, and modernizing plant operations can drive industrial growth and bring more jobs to the US.

“Never successfully assemble one, and so if you can build a smartphone in the U.S. that is not taking away American jobs. That is bringing American jobs, McGrew continued.”