From RT1 to MolMoAct2: A brief history of VLAs

Introduction Vision-Language-Action Model is one of the words that I came across frequently while starting out on twitter in the robot learning community. In 2026 with every "GPT moment for robotics"

Introduction Vision-Language-Action Model is one of the words that I came across frequently while starting out on twitter in the robot learning community. In 2026 with every "GPT moment for robotics" what I felt interesting was that robotics is yet to converge to a consensus on what is the big thing to scale and people strongly bet on different methods, one of them being VLAs. I wanted to understand how we got here, what actually changed from RT-1 to newer models like MolmoAct 2, and which archi