Do robots still need specialized models? Data says yes, even with frontier VLMs
Ok-Possible-5566 · reddit · 2026-11-13
A Reddit deep-dive argues frontier multimodal models won't make specialized embodied models obsolete: Fable 5.2 scored 64.9% vs Astra's 29.8% on RoboDojo Sim; an academic real-robot eval of Astra was halted after physically unsafe actions broke hardware; the LingBot-Touch tactile encoder matched or beat no-touch baselines in 99/104 policy combos, while raw tactile input hurt 22 pairs. Author's take: general models as the reasoning layer, fast touch/motion-trained models for low-level control.
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