Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Why this moment matters Until now, the state of the art in robot reasoning was proprietary. Boston Dynamics runs closed inference on Atlas. Figure AI's Figure-02 platform is not open. Tesla's Optimus uses a completely internal stack. The closest thing to an open-source robotics foundation model was OpenVLA — useful, but meaningfully behind the proprietary leaders in real-world generalisation. MolmoAct2 changes that calculus. An action reasoning model achieving 87.1% success on unseen real-world manipulation tasks, released with full weights, data, and code, represents a structural shift in who can build on frontier robotics AI. This is not merely an academic milestone. The practical consequence is that a robotics startup in Bengaluru, a university lab in Bristol, or a warehouse automation…
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