XI’AN, CHINA – JULY 22: Wang Xingxing, founder of Unitree Robotics, speaks at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Internet Conference Digital Silk Road Development Forum held in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China on July 22, 2026.
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Wang Xingxing, founder of Unitree Robotics, said the “ChatGPT moment” for humanoid robots may be a decade away, following the company’s soaring market debut.
Unitree made its debut in Shanghai on Wednesday and closed 460% above its 150.80 yuan offering price, more than five times the company’s $905 million initial public offering price, amid huge interest in humanoid robotics as an emerging field.
But speaking Thursday at the World Robotics Congress in Beijing, Wang said the real breakthrough in robotics, or that “ChatGPT moment,” will be when a robot can be placed in a stranger’s home and complete about 80% of its tasks with just text or voice commands.
“If things move quickly, it could happen in two to three years, and if things move slowly, it could happen in five to 10 years,” he said, according to a CNBC translation of his speech in Mandarin.
The prediction is more cautious than when Wang said in a speech at the same conference last year that such a moment could come within five years. The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 proved to be a game-changing moment for generative AI, helping to ignite a bull market in tech stocks and data center construction.
Wang’s comments highlight the gap between investor enthusiasm for humanoid robots and current commercial capabilities.
Unitree’s robots are still less efficient than human workers and must be retrained from scratch for each new task, Wang said. The inability to generalize across tasks and environments is a central obstacle facing the industry as a whole, Wang told the conference.
Unitree’s stock price fell nearly 19% on Thursday to close at 687 yuan, according to LSEG data.
Founded in 2016, the company rose to fame after videos of robots dancing and performing kung fu kicks went viral. But the question that still hangs over stocks is whether the technology behind this spectacle can be scaled up commercially, given the unresolved limitations of AI and software.
Wang said in Thursday’s speech that perfecting the precision of the robot’s movements is the biggest challenge, because while the robot can reliably plan a wide range of movements, it fails in the “last centimeters and millimeters.”
To bridge this gap, Unitree is pursuing a “self-evolving development loop,” Wang said. An AI model writes and tests the robot’s control code, and the results of each round are scored and fed back to improve the accuracy of the next version.
China dominates the rapidly increasing shipments of humanoid robots
According to Morgan Stanley, global shipments of humanoid robots reached approximately 19,000 units in the first half of 2026, an increase of 272% from the same period last year, of which Chinese manufacturers accounted for 97%.
Morgan Stanley predicts that shipments of humanoid robots in China will reach 50,000 this year, up from 12,000 in 2025.
“Unitree’s IPO will shine a spotlight on the commercial potential of China’s robot boom,” said Ying Zhang of the Economist Intelligence Unit. The next test for embodied AI will be whether technological advances lead to increased productivity and economic benefits that justify large-scale adoption, Zhang said.
Nomura initiated coverage of Unitree on Wednesday with a buy rating and a 370 yuan price target, citing the company’s hardware cost moat and speed of product iteration. Nomura estimates that outsourced parts will account for less than one-fifth of total costs, which will expand gross profit margins from 44% in 2022 to 60% in 2025.
Nomura analysts say that rapid product iteration and continuous innovation allow Unitree to reach new application scenarios ahead of its peers, giving it a “first-mover advantage” as new demands emerge.
Tether CEO calls Unitree “a company to watch”
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of stablecoin company Tether, told CNBC that Unitree is “definitely a company to watch when it comes to advancements in robotics.”
Tether has invested heavily in the robotics industry, backing Germany’s NEURA Robotics in a $1.4 billion funding round in June alongside Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm and others.
Unitree “has been showing off incredible skills over the last few years to demonstrate the precision, capability and dexterity of these robots. This is definitely a defining moment,” Ardoino said on Wednesday’s “Squawk Box Europe” show.
—CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.
