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Humanoid robots could hit a “ChatGPT moment” within two to three years under ideal conditions, and five to ten if progress stalls, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing stated at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Thursday. His statements come just one day after his company’s Shanghai listing saw the stock surge more than 460% before it dipped.
Unitree CEO describes tipping point
Wang mentioned his targets for the industry’s ambitions, stating he wants a robot that can walk into a home or workplace it has never seen and finish about 80% of tasks using only spoken or typed instructions. He described the same benchmark as about 80% of tasks across 80% of unfamiliar settings, and called it “an important tipping point for the robot industry to usher in explosive growth.”
When OpenAI’s chatbot launched in late 2022, it moved LLMs from being just a lab novelty to a product that was marketed en-masse in a matter of weeks. Models that let machines read and navigate physical space have had nothing of such, and the Unitree CEO believes the robot industry is still waiting for its own version of that leap.
Wang also candidly noted the reasons why robots break, explaining that robots trained for a while in a fixed room can get close to a perfect success rate, but they fail the moment an object is swapped or the space they are in change. He claimed the drawback remained the gap between digital models and physical hardware.
Wang said that residual error was the biggest bottleneck facing AI embodied in physical robots anywhere, and claimed decision-making models were the industry’s central weakness.
He also conceded that Unitree was still quite behind at putting physical AI to real-world use, even though world models take the company’s largest share of capital and staff.
Cautious message after Shanghai stock surge
Unitree became the first humanoid maker to list on China’s A-share market on Wednesday, and its shares closed the day at 460.34% above the 150.80 yuan offer price, valuing the Hangzhou company at 340 billion yuan, or about $50.42 billion. The stock then fell sharply on Thursday.
“Relative to the mood around World Robot Conference and Unitree’s spectacular IPO, Wang Xingxing was notably sober about current capabilities,” Georg Stieler, who heads automation at consultancy Stieler, told Technology.org.
However, everyone in the field is not as measured on timing as the Unitree CEO. Wang He, founder of the startup Galbot, expects the sector to reach its ChatGPT moment by 2028, defining it as robots handling 70% to 80% of everyday tasks without special training. Unitree’s prospectus shows that most of its buyers are still universities and research institutions and not factories, with the company shipping more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025.
China continues to fund humanoid robots
China delivered over 40,000 units in the first half of this year and accounted for 97% of global shipments, according to a Chinese industry body report cited by Technology.org. A shrinking workforce makes machines appealing for repetitive and dangerous jobs even if they are not as efficient as human workers. A State Council research center has projected the physical AI market at 400 billion yuan by 2030 and above one trillion yuan by 2035.
Beijing’s economic planners have, however, told manufacturers to stop flooding the market with near-identical designs, while the U.S. Federal Communications Commission banned future imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots on national security grounds last month.
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