MolmoAct2: The First Fully Open Robot Controller That Beats Closed-Source Giants
A robot that can fold laundry, pack medication, and pour tea - controlled by a single model - sounds like science fiction. But it’s exactly what’s needed for real deployment. The problem? The best robot controllers are either closed-source (π0.5), too slow (reasoning models that generate hundreds of tokens before moving), or tied to hardware most labs can’t afford. MolmoAct2 (Fang, Duan et al., Allen AI / UW / Stanford / NVIDIA / MIT, May 2026) solves all five problems at once: it’s fully open (weights, code, data), runs at 55.79 Hz, deploys on platforms costing under $6,000, and achieves 97.2% success on LIBERO - beating every open and closed baseline. The secret? Let the robot’s action generator peek into the language model’s brain at every layer, not just the final output. ...