The day after his robot company's stock closed 460 percent up, the founder said the breakthrough might be ten years out
Speaking at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on 20 August, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing put a number on the industry's favourite phrase. The "ChatGPT moment" for humanoid robots, he said, could come in two to three years at the fastest and five or even ten years at the slowest — a window that runs to 2036. He also defined what he means by it, which is the useful part: a robot you put into a home it has never seen, which then completes roughly 80 percent of everyday tasks from voice or text instructions alone. Against that bar he listed what is still missing. Robots do not generalise well to unfamiliar tasks, precise movement remains hard, his own machines are less efficient than human workers, and each new task requires retraining from scratch. The timing gives the remarks their weight: Unitree had listed in Shanghai the day before, closing 460 percent above its offer price on debut, and the stock fell 11 percent the following session.
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