TL;DRChinese startup Spirit AI tops the RoboArena leaderboard Nvidia co-built, scoring 1,924 to Nvidia’s 1,881 as physical AI becomes the next tech battleground.
Two days. That is how long Nvidia’s latest robotics model sat at the top of the RoboArena leaderboard before a startup from Hangzhou knocked it off.
On Wednesday, Spirit AI announced that its foundation model for embodied intelligence, Spirit v1.6, had scored 1,924 on the benchmark, edging out Nvidia’s Cosmos3-Nano-Policy at 1,881. A second Nvidia project, DreamZero, came third with 1,763. It is the first time a Chinese model has claimed the top spot on RoboArena, a benchmark Nvidia co-developed with Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
The timing stings. Nvidia had launched its Cosmos 3 omnimodel at Computex in Taipei on 1 June, calling it the “open frontier foundation model for physical AI.” Trained on 20 trillion tokens of multimodal data, Cosmos 3 was supposed to demonstrate the company’s dominance in a category it practically invented. Spirit AI had other plans.
What physical AI actually measures
