CEO of viral backflipping robot company says robots may be years from their ‘ChatGPT moment,’ even after investors sent his stock soaring 460% | Fortune
The CEO of a Chinese robotics company whose stock skyrocketed 460% after going public this week said humanoid robots might still be far away from their own “ChatGPT moment.”
The 36-year-old CEO behind robotics company Unitree, Wang Xingxing, said Thursday the industry’s breakthrough, or “ChatGPT moment,” could take “2 to 3 years at the fastest, and 5 or even 10 years at the slowest,” according to a translation of a speech he gave at the World Robot Conference in Beijing, previously reported by CNBC.
Robots will only reach this point when they can be placed in an unfamiliar environment or a home and handle about 80% of tasks through voice commands or text alone, he said.
Wang’s comments reflect a shift from last year at the same conference, when he said the breakthrough moment for robotics would come within five years at the latest. His statement also seemed to conflict with the outsized enthusiasm shown by investors who skyrocketed the company’s stock 460% on Wednesday when it listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market for the first time.
Despite having been founded by Wang a decade ago, Unitree became a household name in the robotics industry overnight last year after a viral video showed the company’s humanoid robots performing a coordinated dance alongside humans during the Spring Festival Gala broadcast on China’s state TV.
Less than a month later, Wang was one of only a handful of executives seated in the front row, alongside BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu and Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, during a private enterprise symposium hosted by China’s president, Xi Jinping in Beijing.
“Artificial-intelligence-driven robots are evolving at an incredibly fast pace, surpassing my expectations. Every day brings new surprises,” Wang told China state TV following the meeting, the South China Morning Post reported.
Fast forward to this year’s Spring Festival Gala, and Unitree again impressed the crowd with its robots’ more advanced moves that included backflips and leaps over platforms.
These feats culminated in Unitree’s exuberant public listing this week, in which it raised $900 million at a valuation of $9 billion. After trading opened, Unitree reached a valuation of $66 billion, dwarfing U.S.-based robotics company Figure AI, which was last valued at $39 billion after a funding round last year.
After a stellar first day of trading, which Fortune previously reported is not unusual in China because regulators tend to keep IPO valuations conservative to protect investors, Unitree’s stock fell about 19% on Thursday. Its stock closed down another 2% Friday as of market close in Shanghai.
Just because Unitree’s robots can perform impressive feats doesn’t mean the company is on the verge of ushering in a humanoid robot revolution. While ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, helped spark a flurry of competition and advances for large language models, the same idea isn’t easily applied to robots because of their complexity.
Wang admitted in the same speech Thursday that Unitree’s robots are still less efficient than human workers and must be retrained for every new task. The fact that robots still cannot adapt to new situations and tasks easily is holding back the robotics industry, he added.
Still, Wang noted that the company is working on a self-evolving development loop where its AI tests a robot’s “control code” and continuously scores its results in collaboration with humans to help improve and ultimately perfect the precision of its robots’ movements, which he said can go awry in “the last few centimeters or millimeters.”
Role: Reporter
Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez is a reporter for Fortune covering general business news.