Wang Xingxing spent Thursday morning at the World Robot Conference in Beijing telling the room that humanoid robots are approaching their “ChatGPT moment”. He spent another part of the same appearance explaining why that moment might still be a decade away.
The Unitree founder and chief executive was speaking the day after his company’s Shanghai listing, where the shares climbed almost sixfold on debut before giving back 11% on Thursday. It is not the usual thing for a chief executive to spend the morning after a blockbuster float lowering expectations, which is roughly what he did.
“We are marching towards a ‘ChatGPT moment’ in embodied intelligence,” Wang said, according to accounts of his remarks at the conference. What he means by the phrase is unusually specific for a sector that trades heavily on vagueness.
The test, as he set it out, is a robot introduced into a household it has never seen before, taking instructions by voice or text, and completing roughly 80% of what it is asked to do.
Wang called that threshold an important tipping point for the industry, and he has been refining the formulation for some time: at the Hongqiao forum in Shanghai last November, he pinned it to a double target of 80% of tasks across 80% of unfamiliar scenes, with no scene-specific training beforehand.
