Praxis-1: How Runway Turned a Video Foundation Model Into a Robot Brain
Runway is best known for video generation tools used by filmmakers and designers. But the company just released something that points in a very different direction: Praxis-1 , a 27-billion-parameter open-weight model that controls real robots by predicting what the world will look like next β and what actions will get it there.
The model is now available under the Apache 2.0 license, and it currently ranks first among world action models on NVIDIA's RoboLab-120 leaderboard , outperforming alternatives like FLUX 3 Action, Cosmos 3 Nano, and Ο0.5. What makes it interesting isn't just the benchmark number β it's the architectural bet underneath it.
The Core Idea: Video Pretraining as a Shortcut to Robot Control
Training a robot policy from scratch requires enormous amounts of robot-specific data, which is expensive and slow to collect.β¦
