RLWRLD, a South Korean company, unveiled its physical AI foundation model RLDX-1 at a press briefing held by its Japanese subsidiary, highlighting the growing number of inquiries from Japanese companies that assume implementation.
RLWRLD said it is focusing on the Japanese market, where the manufacturing sector is large, data is abundant and labor shortages are severe, and that more companies are considering the adoption of physical AI. Japanese companies including KDDI, ANA Holdings, Mitsui Chemicals and Shimadzu Corporation are among them. Following its founding in South Korea, RLWRLD established a base in Japan and later set up a U.S. headquarters, clarifying the division of its operations.
RLWRLD released RLDX-1 as a foundation model for the Japanese market. Rather than developing hardware itself, the company uses equipment supplied by partner companies. It said the model received the top rating on public benchmarks, outperforming models such as Peking University’s X-VLA. The company emphasized that releasing the model would make it easier to obtain evaluations from academia and businesses.
The nature of questions from Japanese companies changed significantly in the second half of this year. In the first half, many inquiries centered on video demonstrations, such as whether a particular task was possible. In the second half, more questions assumed implementation, including “Can it be deployed in the field two years from now?”, “Can it be implemented in the field now?”, “What is the maximum inference time in seconds?” and “What is the success rate?” In response, the importance of collecting field data and fine-tuning was explained.