Unitree CEO Says Humanoid Robots Still Have Years to Earn Their ChatGPT Moment

Unitree CEO Says Humanoid Robots Still Have Years to Earn Their ChatGPT Moment
Unitree’s spectacular stock-market debut has not persuaded its chief executive that humanoid robots are ready for the living room. Wang Xingxing says the industry still has to solve the far harder problem: making machines useful when nobody has mapped out the task in advance.

At the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Thursday, Wang set a demanding benchmark for robotics’ long-awaited “ChatGPT moment.” A robot would need to enter a home it had never seen and complete roughly 80% of requested tasks through voice or language instructions, without being specially trained for that setting. “Then I think we will have roughly reached the ‘ChatGPT moment’ for embodied intelligence.”

Wang’s timetable was deliberately broad: two or three years in a fast-moving scenario, or five to 10 years if progress slows. The gap is not simply better software. Robots must interact reliably with the physical world, he said, while their efficiency and ability to generalize across jobs remain bottlenecks even after Unitree’s tests in car factories and its own facilities.

That caution lands just days after the Chinese company raised about $900 million in an oversubscribed Shanghai listing and saw its shares jump 460% on their first trading day, putting its valuation near $50 billion. The market is betting heavily on physical AI; Wang is warning that the demonstration videos have not yet become dependable household labor.

His view also contrasts with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who said last month that robotics’ ChatGPT moment had already arrived a couple of years ago. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is closer to Wang on timing, predicting a breakthrough within two to three years, but more aggressive on adoption: he has forecast humanoids in most homes during the 2030s, potentially rented for $300 to $400 a month.

For now, Unitree’s $13,500 G1 underscores the divide between that vision and the present. Cheaper humanoids may be arriving; broadly capable ones, Wang argues, are not here yet.

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