The World Robotics Congress, which will be held in Beijing on August 21, 2026, will be visited by the general public and foreign tourists alike.
Evelyn Chen | CNBC
Hello, I’m Evelyn. I am writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection. This is a snapshot of what I’ve seen and heard from local businesses.
Unitree’s founder reminded everyone at last week’s World Robotics Conference that the biggest challenge for humanoids is learning human skills. AI can help, but is there a secret sauce?
big story
QJ Robots, a startup that helps robots learn human skills, is backed by Temasek, said founder and CEO Haichuan Gao.
The company’s AI models focus on helping robots predict the world around them and perform tasks more efficiently.
QJ Robots claims that companies, mainly in mainland China, have installed the model on more than 100,000 robots and have already generated more than 100 million yuan ($15 million) in revenue.
This will give the company a large base to collect data every month, said Tianren Zhang, chief technology officer. But that’s not enough. More types of data are needed to effectively train models, he said.
Zhang and CEO Gao both earned PhDs in automation from Tsinghua University, and their three-year-old company started at Tsinghua University’s Brain Computing Research Center.
This is all part of the tech industry’s growing focus on world models that aim to more closely mimic the physical world than ChatGPT-type “large-scale language models” focused on text generation.
One of the Chinese government’s approaches is to encourage industrial giants to integrate and develop AI capabilities. This is the edge of the manufacturing ecosystem that local startups are leveraging.
Another Tsinghua University graduate, Qiao Yu, started Lumos, an industrial-focused robotics company, two years ago. Its supporters and partners include Mitsubishi Electric.
Lumos has launched its own center to collect training data. But Yu said earlier this year that factories and other companies realized that to use more robots effectively, they needed a platform that translated data and AI instructions into task completion. The startup officially announced its NexCore system last week, which it claims can work with a variety of robots, not just Lumos’s.
However, the competition to build the best autonomous robot solutions is heating up.
Exactly one year ago, Ace Robotics launched with SenseTime co-founder Wang Xiaogang as the startup’s chairman.
He said effective humanoid robot solutions require combining hardware, models and data with use case scenarios. Wang said real-world data is important because using online videos for training can introduce unrealistic special effects into the model.
Ace Robotics’ products include wearable sensors to accurately capture data from human activities.
Wang predicts that by the end of next year, the industry will have collected enough data for a breakthrough moment, just as the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 transformed what companies can do with AI.
It’s less clear whether the market will wait that long. Unitree’s stock price fell after founder Wang Xingxing sought to dampen expectations for humanoid commercialization, while general visitors were often left blatantly unimpressed at the booth at conferences.
Aside from the dancing robots, the machines that folded clothes and sold water moved slowly and stiffly. One person waiting to buy a bottle of water pointed out in Mandarin that people were just holding back because it was a robot.
If it were a human being, I would definitely get angry if it took this long.
need to know
The biggest hurdle for China’s humanoid robots
Jeff Bernstein, president of the Association for the Advancement of Automation, said the impact of U.S. regulations on foreign-made advanced robotic devices has not yet been significant because humanoids are rarely used domestically.
Popmart stock falls due to sales decline outside China; Citi lowers price target
The Lubu maker said sales in China rose 47.3% in the first half of this year, contributing to overall sales of 17.17 billion yuan ($2.55 billion), a 23.8% increase. However, sales in the Americas decreased by 16.5%, and sales in the Asia-Pacific region excluding China decreased by 9.7%.
AI spending reduces net profit by 75%, Alibaba stock falls by 5%
Revenue from the tech giant’s main cloud division totaled 48.4 billion yuan, an increase of 45% year-on-year. CEO Eddie Wu said in a statement Thursday that sales of AI-related products have achieved “12 consecutive quarters of triple-digit growth.”
very soon
August 27: July industrial profits
August 27-28: APEC 3rd High-Level Meeting in Dalian
August 31: Official Manufacturing and Services PMI
September 1: RatingDog China General Manufacturing PMI
