(1/6) From @GoogleDeepmind’s AlphaGo to AlphaZero, we saw machines find moves that reached beyond what we’d imagined for them. No one taught them those strategies. They emerged from reinforcement learning: playing, failing, and trying again under a single binary task reward for success or failure. Inspired by them, we couldn’t help but wonder: what might a robot discover if we gave it that same freedom to learn? That question led us to AlphaNIST. Starting tabula rasa, with that same binary reward plus only a simple control cost, a single policy solves all 20 @NIST assembly tasks at a 98.2% success rate in simulation. More surprising still, AlphaNIST can complete 10 different tasks in a row, receiving that reward only once, after all 10 are done. Just as AlphaGo’s strategies surprised its creators, AlphaNIST discovered dexterous strategies we couldn’t have come up with ourselves. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2610.13354 Website: alpha-nist.github.io

Introducing S1, our new foundation model that learns from one example. It can be taught 10-minute long tasks that it has never seen before, from one video prompt without any fine-tuning. Watch S1 operate in real-time via in-context learning: