How Google's RT-2 set the template for today's robotics models

Google's RT-2 model, announced in July 2023, trained a multimodal LLM to output robot actions directly, and the article argues this approach launched the current robotics boom.

The author follows later work from Physical Intelligence, including action chunking with flow matching, reinforcement learning on real robots, and visual subgoal generation, and notes that the field is debating whether vision-language-action models will give way to world models.