German AI company releases free robot model that beats Nvidia

The German AI company Black Forest Labs has launched FLUX 3 Action, a new type of AI model that can control robot arms. The model looks at a camera image, the robot's position and a text instruction (for example, "stack the blocks") and works out which movements the robot needs to make.

What makes it special is that the model is "open weights." This means the numbers and settings that make up the AI model itself are freely available to everyone. Companies and researchers can download the model and build on it themselves, instead of paying for a closed solution.

Black Forest Labs writes that FLUX 3 Action tops a recognized test called RoboLab-120, which Nvidia itself is behind. The model has 7 billion parameters (a measure of how "big" and complex an AI model is), while Nvidia's comparable model, Cosmos3-Nano-Policy, has 16 billion. Even so, the smaller model performs better and runs up to several times faster, according to the company.

At the same time, the picture is not pure competition against Nvidia. The model was trained on Nvidia's own data center hardware, and the two companies have worked together to make FLUX 3 Action easier to use on Nvidia's small Jetson computers, which are often built into robots. The model is also integrated into Hugging Face's popular robotics tool LeRobot and can be tried out on inexpensive robot arms such as the SO-101.

For ordinary readers, the news means that building robots that can learn new tasks is becoming cheaper and more open. Where the big tech giants typically keep their best AI models closed, Black Forest Labs is making its robot model free to download, modify and use, even though it still requires a powerful computer to run.