China’s Robot Olympics Should Terrify You

Hello Futurists,

This weekend I watched a robot in Beijing run a 100M race in 9.39 seconds, breaking Usain Bolt’s human world record… and then slam into a wall at full speed before getting carried off on a stretcher.

Then I proceeded to watch multiple 6ft+ humanoids break 5 more Olympic World Records in what has to be the most bizarrely impressive feat of robotics I’ve ever seen.

But here’s why I can’t stop thinking about this: it’s never been more clear to me that China is so far ahead of the USA.

This is different from pure AI models too. An AI model can easily game a benchmark (memorize the test, who’s checking?), but a robot can’t fake a 3.5 meter vertical jump like I saw on Wednesday.

And the monopoly China has on robotics is larger than you think. In this Robot Olympics, 96% of the “athletes” were Chinese-made… and they’re improving very quickly.

Last year’s winning 100m time was 21.5 seconds (even i can manage that). Can you imagine what these things look like next year?

-Ejaaz

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This was the second World Humanoid Robot Games ran this week at Beijing’s Olympic speed skating oval:

• 666 teams

• 2,056 robots competing in 51 events

• Running, Boxing, Football, Table tennis, and so much more.

Technically 16 countries were represented… but 641 of the 666 teams were Chinese.

Every flat-track event had to be run fully autonomously this year, so no remote control or human with a joystick. If the robot fell it had to get up by itself.

My favorite moment was the 400m final. A robot called Tiangong Ultra won it in 38.15 seconds, smashing the human world record of 43.03. But I was too distracted by the slo-mo. It ran with its arms held up near its face, swinging wildly from side-to-side almost as if it was praying for a win.

What was so impressive about this was it was entirely self-taught behavior. The engineers that built it had never programmed that technique; the robot taught itself to run that way through reinforcement learning (millions of simulated practice runs where it gets rewarded for going faster) and decided this was the quickest way for its body to move.

Now to be clear, plenty of robots tripped, collided, and caught on fire, but this was a drastic improvement on last year… and we have to ask ourselves: how China is dominating here?

I saw a clip on Chinese state TV that made a good point: they’re “transferring our established automotive supply chain to robotics.” Essentially China’s manufacturing dominance in vehicles, electronic devices, etc. had handed them the perfect foundation to win at robotics. All the motors, batteries, and drive systems that humanoids are built from are basically already there for free.

Then there’s the money. China has attracted nearly 50% of all global venture capital in humanoid robotics. 1 company (Zhiyuan) shipped about 40% of the entire world’s humanoids last year. The Chinese government is also running a state fund targeting roughly $148 billion for AI and robotics, and Xi has named it a strategic national priority.

We’re already seeing the fruits of this commitment: 2 weeks ago Unitree (China’s popular robotics lab) IPO’d and closed its first day up 460%, worth around $50B.

Ok so what about the US? There’s still no national robotics strategy, even though Elon and Boston Dynamics have literally been begging them for one. More embarrassingly at CES this year, 21 of the 38 humanoid robot exhibitors were Chinese. This is the American tech show.

Morgan Stanley sees China’s humanoid market growing from ~$2 billion today to $15 billion by 2030, and China is openly targeting 1 million units a year.

So if we step back… in AI models, the US obviously leads (for now). But in robotics (which many believe to be the physical manifestation of AI), the roles are reversed and hardware tends to be stickier than software because its harder to replace. You can copy a model architecture in a few months, but it’s much harder to build the same supply chain China has.

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