❯ Unitree’s Wang Xingxing says his biggest mistake was not believing in AI enough and expects embodied AI’s tipping point in as little as one to two years

"Not believing in AI enough"The 26th China International Industry Fair opened in Shanghai on October 12. According to Yicai, Wang Xingxing, founder of robot maker Unitree Robotics, said in a dialogue session at the opening ceremony: “My personal faith in AI keeps growing. The biggest mistake I made over the past decade or so was not believing in AI enough.”

One to two years at the fastestWang expects the tipping point for the embodied AI industry to come fairly soon, in as little as one to two years. Embodied AI means robots that use AI models to understand their surroundings and complete tasks on their own. He said the release of GPT-6 changed how the industry thinks, and that his team deployed it on robots for task tests with fairly good results. He added that large-scale use still requires solving generalization and efficiency, which he expects to happen in the next few years.

Commercial services first, factories and homes laterAccording to 21jingji.com, Wang thinks commercial service settings may be adopted faster than industrial ones, with homes coming later. Xiang Shaoqing, co-founder of Hesai Technology, who joined the same dialogue, spoke about data: human operation data, simulation data and real-robot data need to advance together. A shift in how robot companies read the field directly affects how much research they move from hardware to models.

▮ SIGNALWhen a hardware-first robot founder publicly raises his expectations for AI, the industry’s view of its bottleneck is moving from the body to when the brain will be good enough.