Unitree's 10th Anniversary, Wang Xingxing: I Advise You to Believe in AI

On October 22, the Hangzhou International Expo Center was buzzing with activity—not only were there many people, but there were also especially many robots.

This was the scene at the 2026 World Physical AI Conference hosted by Unitree Robotics. From quadruped robots to humanoid robots, you could even say this is the place with the highest "robot density" in the world.

2026 also marks the tenth year since Unitree Robotics was founded. Interestingly, on today's stage, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing, aside from talking about robots, spoke most about the hottest topic of the moment: AI.

In Wang Xingxing's 36-minute speech, Unitree's own products only occupied the beginning and the end. The longest section in the middle was Wang Xingxing doing one thing—persuading people to believe in AI.

From AI conquering a batch of top-level mathematical problems, with "the tip of humanity's most intelligent pyramid" already breached; to AI reverse engineering making "the moats of traditional software companies disappear"; to the expressions and emotions of characters in AI videos being "much better than what real actors perform"; to top large-model companies having "already achieved self-evolution of models" internally.

"This is not a joke." His conclusion was that with current model capabilities, even if they progress no further, the information world has already been "completely breached."

Then he said something not quite like what a listed company chairman would say: "I feel that I myself still don't believe enough, still aren't firm enough."

This was not improvisation. Ten days earlier, at the Shanghai Industrial Expo, he had already publicly "admitted his mistake" once: "The biggest mistake I've made over the past decade or so is that I didn't believe in AI enough." He also gave a multiplier: the degree to which you liked and believed in AI 5 or 10 years ago, "even multiplying it by 10 now would not be an exaggeration."

The more intuitive change is in the timeline. At the World Robot Conference in August this year, Wang Xingxing's expectation for embodied intelligence's "ChatGPT moment" was still 2 to 3 years at the fastest, or 5 to 10 years at the slowest; two months later, he compressed that window to "1 to 2 years, or 2 to 3 years at the slowest." As for casually bringing a Unitree robot into an unfamiliar home and telling it in one sentence to tidy up the room, "at the fastest it might be achievable next year." At the Industrial Expo he put it even more bluntly: "When GPT-7 comes out next year, it may directly break through the embodied intelligence problem."

But Unitree's strength—the robot body itself—remains something Wang Xingxing is proud of.

What Wang Xingxing was most proud of on stage was the G1. This humanoid robot, released in May 2024, has cumulatively rolled off the line at about 10,000 to 20,000 units, which he called the humanoid robot with the largest shipment volume for a single model globally.

On October 21, Unitree released the H2-X "Kung Fu Legend: Guardian" video, in which it kicks in a car door, lifts a car bare-handed, and lands a backflip from a 4-meter-high platform, with battery life extended from about 3 hours on the H2 to about 8 hours. It can be seen that the Unitree team is still rapidly iterating the company's products.

He was very candid on stage: "After all, we are a new company," and "making an identical model" to the world's top multimodal large-model companies "is not very realistic." Unitree will develop its own models and also cooperate with large-model companies at home and abroad. The most impressive demo he showed was connecting GPT-6 to a robot, which, with zero training, could wash brushes, change paint, and precisely place pieces on a Go board. He judged that problems such as planning and navigation "have in a sense already been solved," and what remains is the alignment between the input and output of multimodal large models and real robots—sensor errors and actuator errors. "I think this is also a problem that can be solved very quickly."

Connecting these few sentences makes clear the business logic behind this "faith." If the robot's brain is ultimately provided by companies like OpenAI and Google, and, as he says, becomes increasingly powerful and increasingly cheap, then the deciding factor in the embodied intelligence race will return to who can manufacture reliable bodies most cheaply and at the largest scale. This is precisely what Unitree is best at.

So among the most important things Wang Xingxing listed for the future, the first is not models but the large-scale manufacturing capability of hardware. Unitree currently produces tens of thousands of robots and hundreds of thousands of joint motors a year, which in his view is "completely insufficient"; true popularization requires at least "tens of millions of units per year." He even talked about computing clusters, chip production capacity, and mines. As for Unitree's own model capabilities, what he is betting on is a "self-evolution" loop that lets AI retrieve papers on its own, write control code, train in simulation, test on real machines, and then feed the scoring results back. The premise of this approach is likewise that foundation models are getting stronger every month; in his words, "the more model capabilities improve," the more this loop "will also become stronger and stronger."

At the end of the speech, Wang Xingxing talked about a "crossing timeline" between himself and AI. In 2009, as a college freshman, the first robot he made was a bipedal humanoid; in a university computer course that required a short essay, his topic was "as the scale of neural networks increases, capabilities will become stronger and stronger," on the grounds that the human brain is larger than those of chickens, dogs, and pigs, so humans are smarter. Then came AlphaGo in 2016, and ChatGPT at the end of 2022, the latter of which directly prompted Unitree to formally enter humanoid robots in 2023.

This recollection was told very sincerely, and also very selectively. It turned more than a decade of a hardware engineer's life into a straight line always pointing toward AI. Perhaps he did indeed believe very early on, only not firmly enough; perhaps this era is forcing every robotics company to tell the same story.

Beyond the bustle of the booths

At this World Physical AI Conference hosted by Unitree, the booth area could be described as the classic scene of more robots than people. In addition to traditional showcases such as ring battles and table tennis, you can even see robots doing diabolo and playing "kendama"—yes, the developer of the kendama-playing robot speaks Japanese.

The kendama-playing robot | Image source: Geek Park

Robot dogs of various forms | Image source: Geek Park

Throughout the exhibition area, we can see that at present, whether quadruped or humanoid robots, the biggest scenario is probably still guided tours and entertainment. For example, you can see the G1 robot wearing a cowboy hat, and you can also see quadruped robot dogs dressed up as pandas, dinosaurs, and lion dancers. A company called Yijing Technology has even equipped robots with a "face" that can make expressions. The team leader told Geek Park that in scenarios such as health care and guided tours, a robot with a "face" still feels more approachable than an ordinary robot, despite a bit of the "uncanny valley" effect.

In addition, scenarios such as security and patrols are also truly being implemented. The person in charge of a company that modifies robot dogs for patrol scenarios told Geek Park that quadruped robot dogs equipped with lidar and related equipment can already replace humans in night duty in residential communities and industrial parks, and in critical situations, human operators can also perform remote operation. And if they carry firefighting equipment on their backs, these quadruped robots can also complete tasks such as firefighting.

Staff members are performing remote operation | Image source: Geek Park

A relatively popular booth in the exhibition area is the one for robot education and courses. A colleague from Unitree told Geek Park that the team has a mature solution that can provide not only hardware but also a package covering hardware, software, and talent, offering schools a complete robot education laboratory so that more students can truly get hands-on experience with the appeal of robot programming.

A robot learning to shoot hoops | Image source: Geek Park

At the conference itself, Wang Xingxing and a group of guests also launched the World Physical AI Competition. Unitree is offering prizes of up to tens of millions of RMB to encourage developers around the world to develop robots. This is also a rare domestic competition that truly cultivates robot developers since DJI's former "RoboMaster" competition.

Just as the new wave of AI in recent years has cultivated countless AI entrepreneurs and super-individuals, when physical AI begins to enter a critical state, this industry likewise needs countless robotics talents, and the World Physical AI Competition is undoubtedly a very good starting point.

Source of this article: Geek Park Risk Disclosure and Disclaimer

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