Unitree Robotics founder Wang Xingxing has said humanoid robots may be as much as ten years away from a genuine “ChatGPT moment”, a breakthrough that he defined as the ability to place a robot in an unfamiliar home and have it complete around 80 percent of tasks through text or voice commands. Speaking on Thursday at the World Robot Conference in Beijing, Wang said such a breakthrough could arrive in two to three years if progress is rapid, or five to ten years if it is slower. The forecast is more cautious than his statement at the same conference last year, when he said such a moment could arrive in under five years.
The remarks came a day after Unitree debuted in Shanghai, closing 460 percent above its 150.80 yuan offer price and more than five times the price at which the company priced its $905 million initial public offering. The stock then dropped nearly 19 percent to close at 687 yuan on Thursday, according to LSEG data. Wang’s comments highlighted the gap between investor enthusiasm and current commercial capability. He said Unitree’s robots remain less efficient than human workers and must be retrained from scratch for each new task, describing the inability to generalize across tasks and environments as the central obstacle facing the industry. Robots can plan broad movements reliably but often fail at “the last few centimeters or millimeters” of precision, he added.
To close that gap, Wang said Unitree is pursuing a self-evolving development loop in which AI models write and test the robots’ control code, with each round of results scored and fed back into the next version. Nomura initiated coverage of the company on Wednesday with a buy rating and a 370-yuan price target, citing Unitree’s hardware cost structure and product iteration pace. Outsourced components account for less than one-fifth of total cost, helping expand gross margin to 60 percent in 2025 from 44 percent in 2022, according to Nomura estimates. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, whose firm backed Germany’s NEURA Robotics in a $1.4 billion round in June alongside Nvidia, Amazon, and Qualcomm, called Unitree “the company to watch” in robotics.
The gap between Wang’s outlook and the market’s reaction reflects a broader tension in the humanoid sector. Global shipments of humanoid robots reached about 19,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 272 percent year-on-year, with Chinese makers accounting for 97 percent of the total, according to Morgan Stanley. The firm forecasts Chinese humanoid shipments will reach 50,000 this year, up from 12,000 in 2025. As Ying Zhang of the Economist Intelligence Unit noted, the next test for embodied AI is whether technological advances translate into productivity gains and economic returns that justify large-scale deployment. Wang’s timeline is a useful counterweight to headline valuations, reinforcing that generalizable, home-ready humanoid capability remains a research problem even as manufacturing volumes and public market appetite continue to expand.
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