A robot just learned 1,000 tasks in a single day — and it’s a big deal for everyday AI

Maybe it's time to pay attention to robots

19 Dec 2025, 14:37 · TechRadar

Features By John-Anthony Disotto published 19 December 2025

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Most of the time, robots grabbing the headlines boil down to a machine doing one very specific thing in a very controlled lab, followed by a promise that this somehow changes everything.

Normally, I just ignore them, because we've been hearing about robots taking over mankind since the inception of science fiction novels, and honestly, nothing really ever seems to come to fruition.

That said, a new report from ScienceRobotics piqued my interest, and I think it's genuinely cool, mesmerizing, and slightly terrifying.

Researchers have managed to teach a robot to learn 1,000 different physical tasks in a single day, each from just one demonstration. Not 1,000 variations of the same movement, either. We’re talking about a huge mix of everyday object interactions like placing, folding, inserting, gripping, and manipulating items in the real world. For robots, that’s a genuinely big deal.

Why robots are usually terrible at learning new tricks

Until now, most robots have been painfully slow learners. Teaching a machine to do even a simple task often requires hundreds or thousands of repeated demonstrations, massive datasets, and a lot of behind-the-scenes tweaking from engineers.

That’s why most robots you see in factories do one thing, over and over again, very well. They’re not adaptable because as soon as you change the task at hand, the cracks begin to show, and everything falls apart.

But a human doesn't work like that. If you show me how to do something once, maybe twice, I can usually muddle through and complete the task on my own.

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