Unitree's Wang Xingxing Says GPT-6 Could Unlock Embodied Intelligence
Unitree Robotics founder and chief executive Wang Xingxing says OpenAI's newest artificial intelligence models may bring a robotics breakthrough as soon as next year, a sharp change from the guidance he gave earlier in the year. He puts the window at one or two years. His remarks carry weight because Unitree, based in Hangzhou, is China's best known humanoid robot maker, and investors and analysts treat them as a bellwether for the domestic sector.
The trigger is GPT-6, OpenAI's flagship model, which arrived with demonstrations of robotic manipulation. OpenAI named the model Astra, and the demonstrations showed what the company calls powerful capabilities in handling objects. Wang said Unitree had tested it on its own robots and got good results, and he raised the prospect that a GPT-7 release could crack embodied intelligence outright, in remarks reported by SCMP.
But his timeline has moved before. Earlier in the year, with GPT-6 not yet released, Wang said the industry might need two or three years at its fastest pace, or as long as a decade, to reach what he calls its ChatGPT moment, a threshold he describes as a critical point of technological maturity. He defines that moment as robots completing around 80 per cent of tasks in 80 per cent of unfamiliar environments from voice or text commands.
What shifted, in his account, is the software. "The whole embodied intelligence industry has been shaken up after the release of GPT-6," he said at the opening of the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai. He also said his biggest mistake across the past decade was not believing in AI enough.
Hardware has been the easier half of the story in China. Humanoid robots there have set speed records at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, and their physical ability keeps improving. Autonomy has not kept pace, which is why questions about how the machines will be sold at scale have not gone away.
And Unitree is now spending on the part it once left to others. The company said it plans to put around half the proceeds of its recent initial public offering into research on robotic models, having built its name on hardware and now turning to the intelligence that drives it. Wang said factory trials are under way, though he described the efficiency and ability of the robots as still needing further improvement.
He had flagged that gap before. The warning came amid growing investor frenzy over China's humanoid robot sector, with Wang cautioning that hardware development was running ahead of the software needed to make robots genuinely intelligent and useful outside controlled settings.
OpenAI has not published a timetable for a GPT-7 model, and no date has been given for a full release of the work Wang is describing. He offered no date either for when the industry might reach the threshold he set out.
So the next phase turns on model releases rather than robot hardware. Unitree can test what OpenAI ships and fund its own software research, and the schedule for either remains unstated.
Wang Xingxing expects a robotics breakthrough within one or two years, against his earlier estimate of two to three years at best
He defines the ChatGPT moment for robots as handling around 80 per cent of tasks in 80 per cent of unfamiliar environments
Unitree tested GPT-6 on its own machines and reported good results
Around half the proceeds of Unitree's recent IPO are earmarked for research on robotic models
Source: SCMP
