Nvidia’s Jim Fan says GR00T keynote teaser shows real autonomous robots at normal speed

That clarification matters more than it sounds. Any robot video now gets asked the same questions: is it sped up, and is someone driving it from behind the curtain? Fan's answer to both is no. The keynote is scheduled for the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2026, set for November 9, 2026, in Austin, Texas.

What Project GR00T is building

Project GR00T is Nvidia's push to create foundation models for humanoid robots. These are general-purpose AI systems that combine vision, language, and action in a single model. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly unveiled the project at GTC 2024.

The model releases have moved quickly since then. Nvidia introduced the open-weight GR00T N1 in March 2025, a 2B-parameter dual-system VLA, short for vision-language-action model. Follow-up versions N1.5 and N1.6 add integration with Cosmos Reason.

Solving the robotics data problem

The core obstacle GR00T targets is data scarcity. Large language models learned from enormous volumes of text. Robots have no equivalent internet-sized library of physical movement to train on.

Nvidia's answer is to multiply that scarce real data with simulation. The project uses platforms such as Isaac Lab and Cosmos, along with advanced teleoperation methods and large-scale synthetic data generation. The methodology expands limited teleoperation data by over 1,000x.

What to watch on November 9

For Nvidia, GR00T fits a broader strategy of supplying the tools other robot builders depend on. The company offers foundation models, simulation platforms like Isaac Lab and Cosmos, and physics engines like Newton.

The things to watch on November 9 are the range of tasks the robots handle, how the training pipeline is described, and how much of the result traces back to the simulation pipeline versus real-world data.