Skild AI unveils new robotics foundation model S1: can learn new tasks from just a single video.

Beating AI Express News reports that Skild AI, a general-purpose robot brain company, has launched its next-generation robot foundation model S1. Its biggest breakthrough is that teaching robots new tasks no longer requires model retuning: users only need to show it a human demonstration video, and the robot can directly learn by example. The tasks demonstrated by the official lasted up to over 10 minutes, including previously untrained scenarios such as flipping pancakes, hand-brewing coffee, and repotting plants. S1 treats the demonstration video directly as a prompt to generate corresponding robot actions. In the repotting experiment, it took just 11 minutes from the start of recording the human demonstration to the robot initiating its own execution. Even if interrupted or encountering errors mid-task, the model adjusts based on the current environment instead of mechanically repeating actions from the video. In Skild’s internal evaluation, both models were pre-trained using the same 100,000 hours of data. When tackling unseen new tasks, S1 achieved an average single-step success rate of 66%, while traditional language-instructed Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models only hit 9%. The latter would need to collect roughly 380 additional task demonstrations and undergo fine-tuning to match S1’s performance after watching a single video. S1 has now been deployed to a small number of industrial clients, with plans to expand its client base in the coming months.