Nvidia open-sources Flora, projects 72-cent robot-video labeling
Nvidia open-sources Flora, projecting robot-video labeling at 72 cents per hour versus GPT-6 Astra's $88.49. Results vary from benchmark to benchmark.
Nvidia open-sourced Flora, a data engine that labels robot video. The number on the box: 72 cents per hour of footage. Nvidia puts GPT-6 Astra at $88.49 for the same hour, about 125 times more, according to The Decoder. Claude Opus 5 cost about $42 per hour and scored much worse.
In a 50-video test, Flora hit 57.1 percent annotation quality against Astra's 53.7 percent, even with Astra allowed its full reasoning capacity. Read the fine print: the Flora costs are projections, not production measurements, based on an assumed $10 per GPU per hour.
What you can install: three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models (a 9B and two 27B, one of them Flora-Rewarder), available on Hugging Face. Nvidia says Flora already runs during GR00T training, annotating up to 200,000 hours of video a day across 512 GB300 GPUs. The report does not say which license covers the models.
The benchmarks are mixed. Flora-Rewarder catches 53.3 percent of failed steps while Astra catches none, but it falsely flags about 11 percent of normal steps. Astra still leads on rubric-based scoring and trajectory ranking. Nvidia pitches Flora as an open alternative to Scale AI's Physical AI Data Engine, and Google's Gemini 4 Argon targets a similar stage.
My take: 72 cents is rental math, not a receipt. But weights you can download beat an invoice. Run it on your own footage before you believe 125x.
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Meanwhile at the anchor desk
A projected drop from $88 to 72 cents, open weights, and a swipe at Scale AI? Nvidia hands out the razor and, per The Decoder, hopes you keep buying its chips. Gorgeous.
On DenseCaptionBench, GPT-6 Astra is both a contestant and the judge, which the researchers acknowledge. Tidier podiums exist.
