robotics

NVIDIA released GR00T N1.7, a 3-billion parameter open-source Vision-Language-Action model for humanoid robots with commercial licensing. The model was trained on 20,854 hours of human egocentric video data and demonstrates the first documented scaling law for robot dexterity, where increasing human video data from 1,000 to 20,000 hours more than doubles task completion rates.

Physical Intelligence published research showing its π0.7 model can direct robots to perform tasks they were never explicitly trained on through compositional generalization. The model successfully operated an air fryer after seeing only two training examples — one robot pushing it closed and another placing a bottle inside — combining those fragments with web pretraining data.

AI2 has released MolmoSpaces and MolmoBot, robotics models trained exclusively in simulation that transfer directly to real robots without manual real-world data collection or fine-tuning. The approach eliminates months of teleoperated demonstrations typically required for simulation-trained robots. Both systems are open-source.

AI2 is developing physical AI systems trained primarily on virtual simulation data rather than expensive real-world demonstrations. The approach, demonstrated through projects like MolmoBot, addresses the historical bottleneck of manually collecting hardware training data.

ABB and NVIDIA have partnered to deploy physical AI simulation in factory automation, addressing the critical sim-to-real gap that has limited intelligent robotics deployment. The approach uses digital physics simulation to train models that transfer reliably to actual factory floors, reducing production hurdles and securing measurable ROI.

World Labs, the AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, has raised $1 billion in new funding to develop spatial intelligence—AI systems capable of understanding and operating in three-dimensional physical environments. The capital will fund the development of world models, a class of AI architecture designed to reason about spatial relationships and physical interactions.