Chinese 'robot brain' startup sees ChatGPT-style breakthrough as soon as next year
BEIJING, Sept 18 (Reuters) - Humanoid robot brains are likely to achieve a breakthrough as soon as mid-2027, but their deployment in homes could take at least eight years as model development faces a data bottleneck, leading Chinese embodied AI firm Spiri...
Key takeaways
- Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, its newest humanoid worker, featuring redesigned legs, larger batteries and a layered safety system that can detect people, slow down, squat and shut off its motors to avoid contact; the company says the robot can lift 23 kg to 2.1 m, run for more than 20 hours a day and will be available to customers in the first half of 2027 with a pipeline of over $300 million in multi‑year orders and a production capacity that could reach about 1,000 units once its Oregon factory scales up.
- In parallel, Chinese embodied‑AI firm Spirit AI warned that robot “brains” remain the weakest link and projects a ChatGPT‑style breakthrough for humanoid cognition by mid‑2027, noting its current Moz1 wheeled humanoids are already used on production lines at CATL and JD.com and that its data‑training centre is collecting “dirty data” from dozens of humans performing everyday motions.
- The second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, held from 22‑26 August, gathered more than 2,000 robots from 16 nations to contest 51 events, setting new performance records such as a 9.44‑foot standing high jump and an 8.64‑second 100‑meter sprint by the Chinese Tiangong Ultra, while also testing practical tasks like package sorting and emergency response in mock homes and factories.
- Meanwhile, research groups and firms such as Figure AI and Helix 2.5 are demonstrating that scaling robot‑training data can dramatically improve zero‑shot generalization across dozens of homes, and analysts at RoboStrategy identify only three U.S. humanoid startups—Agility Robotics, Figure AI and Tesla’s Optimus program—as the most compelling pre‑IPO investment opportunities.
BEIJING, Sept 18 (Reuters) - Humanoid robot brains are likely to achieve a breakthrough as soon as mid-2027, but their deployment in homes could take at least eight years as model development faces a data bottleneck, leading Chinese embodied AI firm Spirit AI said this week.
Despite impressive hardware advances allowing Chinese humanoids to sprint, dance and do backflips on command, Chinese robot firms are increasingly focusing on the software that determines robots' intelligence and their economic productivity in real-world settings.
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"The brain is indeed the weakest link in the complete robotics stack," Gao Yang, co-founder and chief scientist of Spirit AI, told Reuters at its Beijing offices on Thursday. Its Beijing offices include a robot data training centre where a Reuters witness saw dozens of young people fitted with sensors who repeated motions like opening fridges, unlocking safes, and cutting vegetables with knives to train the humanoid robots.
In other robot-training facilities in China, operators may need to repeat a movement more than 50 times to get one "clean" movement with the required precision.
However, Spirit AI found that using "dirty data" with a more diverse range of motions enabled its models to improve faster, Gao said.
Reporting by Laurie Chen; Editing by Eduardo Baptista and Christian Schmollinger
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. An industry breakthrough comparable to OpenAI's landmark GPT-3.0 model, which powered ChatGPT, could come around mid-2027, said Gao. Spirit AI's robots have achieved a 90% success rate for simple tasks in structured living-room environments.
"The next one to two years mark the initial window for industrial applications. Two years from now, we'll see robots deployed in commercial service settings doing simpler tasks. Entering homes is far harder than both," said Gao, who is also an assistant professor of robotics at Tsinghua University.
FOCUSED ON BRAINS
Spirit AI currently has tens of its own Moz1 wheeled humanoid robots deployed on production lines at battery maker CATL and retailer JD.com, which is also an investor.
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