\n<\/p>\n
This is <\/em>The Stepback<\/a>, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on falling robots and the US-China AI race, follow Robert Hart<\/a>. <\/em>The Stepback arrives in our subscribers\u2019 inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nI\u2019ve admitted my fondness<\/a> for robot fail videos on Stepback<\/em> before, and let me tell you the World Humanoid Robot Games did not disappoint.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThe five-day event, which wrapped this week in Beijing, brought high drama, and brought it well. One robot, made by smartphone maker Honor, lost a leg mid-sprint, while others tripped in a flurry of sparks. Another finisher ran straight into a crash mat<\/a>, bounced off it, and promptly burst into flames<\/a>. In the weightlifting<\/a>, one robot lost its balance beneath a modest barbell and toppled inexorably into the judges\u2019 table, arms cartoonishly aloft<\/a>. Robotic cheerleaders tumbled and stumbled<\/a> through routines, while a separate bot fell off a platform<\/a> in circumstances that, had it been human, might have looked suspiciously like it was gawking at the performers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThis was only the second World Humanoid Robot Games, though it was already far bigger than the inaugural event last year<\/a>. Unlike this year, last year\u2019s records were paltry. The winning 100-meter sprint<\/a> was a glacial 21.50 seconds and the highest standing high jump was just 0.95 meters. In keeping with China\u2019s habit of turning robots into public spectacle \u2014 from intricate dances at a Spring Festival Gala<\/a> to demos at major tech events<\/a> \u2014 both this and last year\u2019s games were staged in Beijing\u2019s National Speed Skating Oval, a former Olympic venue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nAnd a spectacle it was. At most sporting events, contestants losing limbs, careening into walls, catching fire, and regularly being carried away on stretchers<\/a> \u2014 oh, and did I mention catching fire?! \u2014 would probably be grounds to stop proceedings. At the Humanoid Robot Games, it was par for the course.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFire aside, the games were unusual in other ways too. Alongside familiar events like sprinting, football, boxing, and weightlifting were more unusual competitions in bed-making, parcel delivery, shelf stacking, clothes folding, and hammering nails. Aptly, there was a firefighting<\/a> contest too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThese less standard offerings spoke to the real purpose of the games: getting robots out of the lab and into the messy real-world environments their makers hope they will ultimately work in. And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFor all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years. Records fell, with one humanoid running the 100-meter sprint<\/a> in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt\u2019s 2009 world record. Another bot reached<\/a> 2.88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993. Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago<\/a>, when even the most advanced machines struggled<\/a> to stay upright.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBut the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful<\/a> in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling \u2014 I don\u2019t see picking up soybeans with tweezers<\/a>, block-building, or powder-weighing<\/a> becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhile many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
I\u2019ve admitted my fondness<\/a> for robot fail videos on Stepback<\/em> before, and let me tell you the World Humanoid Robot Games did not disappoint.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThe five-day event, which wrapped this week in Beijing, brought high drama, and brought it well. One robot, made by smartphone maker Honor, lost a leg mid-sprint, while others tripped in a flurry of sparks. Another finisher ran straight into a crash mat<\/a>, bounced off it, and promptly burst into flames<\/a>. In the weightlifting<\/a>, one robot lost its balance beneath a modest barbell and toppled inexorably into the judges\u2019 table, arms cartoonishly aloft<\/a>. Robotic cheerleaders tumbled and stumbled<\/a> through routines, while a separate bot fell off a platform<\/a> in circumstances that, had it been human, might have looked suspiciously like it was gawking at the performers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThis was only the second World Humanoid Robot Games, though it was already far bigger than the inaugural event last year<\/a>. Unlike this year, last year\u2019s records were paltry. The winning 100-meter sprint<\/a> was a glacial 21.50 seconds and the highest standing high jump was just 0.95 meters. In keeping with China\u2019s habit of turning robots into public spectacle \u2014 from intricate dances at a Spring Festival Gala<\/a> to demos at major tech events<\/a> \u2014 both this and last year\u2019s games were staged in Beijing\u2019s National Speed Skating Oval, a former Olympic venue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nAnd a spectacle it was. At most sporting events, contestants losing limbs, careening into walls, catching fire, and regularly being carried away on stretchers<\/a> \u2014 oh, and did I mention catching fire?! \u2014 would probably be grounds to stop proceedings. At the Humanoid Robot Games, it was par for the course.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFire aside, the games were unusual in other ways too. Alongside familiar events like sprinting, football, boxing, and weightlifting were more unusual competitions in bed-making, parcel delivery, shelf stacking, clothes folding, and hammering nails. Aptly, there was a firefighting<\/a> contest too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThese less standard offerings spoke to the real purpose of the games: getting robots out of the lab and into the messy real-world environments their makers hope they will ultimately work in. And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFor all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years. Records fell, with one humanoid running the 100-meter sprint<\/a> in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt\u2019s 2009 world record. Another bot reached<\/a> 2.88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993. Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago<\/a>, when even the most advanced machines struggled<\/a> to stay upright.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBut the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful<\/a> in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling \u2014 I don\u2019t see picking up soybeans with tweezers<\/a>, block-building, or powder-weighing<\/a> becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhile many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
The five-day event, which wrapped this week in Beijing, brought high drama, and brought it well. One robot, made by smartphone maker Honor, lost a leg mid-sprint, while others tripped in a flurry of sparks. Another finisher ran straight into a crash mat<\/a>, bounced off it, and promptly burst into flames<\/a>. In the weightlifting<\/a>, one robot lost its balance beneath a modest barbell and toppled inexorably into the judges\u2019 table, arms cartoonishly aloft<\/a>. Robotic cheerleaders tumbled and stumbled<\/a> through routines, while a separate bot fell off a platform<\/a> in circumstances that, had it been human, might have looked suspiciously like it was gawking at the performers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThis was only the second World Humanoid Robot Games, though it was already far bigger than the inaugural event last year<\/a>. Unlike this year, last year\u2019s records were paltry. The winning 100-meter sprint<\/a> was a glacial 21.50 seconds and the highest standing high jump was just 0.95 meters. In keeping with China\u2019s habit of turning robots into public spectacle \u2014 from intricate dances at a Spring Festival Gala<\/a> to demos at major tech events<\/a> \u2014 both this and last year\u2019s games were staged in Beijing\u2019s National Speed Skating Oval, a former Olympic venue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nAnd a spectacle it was. At most sporting events, contestants losing limbs, careening into walls, catching fire, and regularly being carried away on stretchers<\/a> \u2014 oh, and did I mention catching fire?! \u2014 would probably be grounds to stop proceedings. At the Humanoid Robot Games, it was par for the course.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFire aside, the games were unusual in other ways too. Alongside familiar events like sprinting, football, boxing, and weightlifting were more unusual competitions in bed-making, parcel delivery, shelf stacking, clothes folding, and hammering nails. Aptly, there was a firefighting<\/a> contest too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThese less standard offerings spoke to the real purpose of the games: getting robots out of the lab and into the messy real-world environments their makers hope they will ultimately work in. And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFor all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years. Records fell, with one humanoid running the 100-meter sprint<\/a> in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt\u2019s 2009 world record. Another bot reached<\/a> 2.88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993. Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago<\/a>, when even the most advanced machines struggled<\/a> to stay upright.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBut the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful<\/a> in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling \u2014 I don\u2019t see picking up soybeans with tweezers<\/a>, block-building, or powder-weighing<\/a> becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhile many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
This was only the second World Humanoid Robot Games, though it was already far bigger than the inaugural event last year<\/a>. Unlike this year, last year\u2019s records were paltry. The winning 100-meter sprint<\/a> was a glacial 21.50 seconds and the highest standing high jump was just 0.95 meters. In keeping with China\u2019s habit of turning robots into public spectacle \u2014 from intricate dances at a Spring Festival Gala<\/a> to demos at major tech events<\/a> \u2014 both this and last year\u2019s games were staged in Beijing\u2019s National Speed Skating Oval, a former Olympic venue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nAnd a spectacle it was. At most sporting events, contestants losing limbs, careening into walls, catching fire, and regularly being carried away on stretchers<\/a> \u2014 oh, and did I mention catching fire?! \u2014 would probably be grounds to stop proceedings. At the Humanoid Robot Games, it was par for the course.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFire aside, the games were unusual in other ways too. Alongside familiar events like sprinting, football, boxing, and weightlifting were more unusual competitions in bed-making, parcel delivery, shelf stacking, clothes folding, and hammering nails. Aptly, there was a firefighting<\/a> contest too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThese less standard offerings spoke to the real purpose of the games: getting robots out of the lab and into the messy real-world environments their makers hope they will ultimately work in. And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFor all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years. Records fell, with one humanoid running the 100-meter sprint<\/a> in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt\u2019s 2009 world record. Another bot reached<\/a> 2.88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993. Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago<\/a>, when even the most advanced machines struggled<\/a> to stay upright.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBut the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful<\/a> in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling \u2014 I don\u2019t see picking up soybeans with tweezers<\/a>, block-building, or powder-weighing<\/a> becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhile many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
And a spectacle it was. At most sporting events, contestants losing limbs, careening into walls, catching fire, and regularly being carried away on stretchers<\/a> \u2014 oh, and did I mention catching fire?! \u2014 would probably be grounds to stop proceedings. At the Humanoid Robot Games, it was par for the course.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFire aside, the games were unusual in other ways too. Alongside familiar events like sprinting, football, boxing, and weightlifting were more unusual competitions in bed-making, parcel delivery, shelf stacking, clothes folding, and hammering nails. Aptly, there was a firefighting<\/a> contest too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThese less standard offerings spoke to the real purpose of the games: getting robots out of the lab and into the messy real-world environments their makers hope they will ultimately work in. And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFor all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years. Records fell, with one humanoid running the 100-meter sprint<\/a> in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt\u2019s 2009 world record. Another bot reached<\/a> 2.88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993. Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago<\/a>, when even the most advanced machines struggled<\/a> to stay upright.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBut the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful<\/a> in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling \u2014 I don\u2019t see picking up soybeans with tweezers<\/a>, block-building, or powder-weighing<\/a> becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhile many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
Fire aside, the games were unusual in other ways too. Alongside familiar events like sprinting, football, boxing, and weightlifting were more unusual competitions in bed-making, parcel delivery, shelf stacking, clothes folding, and hammering nails. Aptly, there was a firefighting<\/a> contest too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThese less standard offerings spoke to the real purpose of the games: getting robots out of the lab and into the messy real-world environments their makers hope they will ultimately work in. And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nFor all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years. Records fell, with one humanoid running the 100-meter sprint<\/a> in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt\u2019s 2009 world record. Another bot reached<\/a> 2.88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993. Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago<\/a>, when even the most advanced machines struggled<\/a> to stay upright.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBut the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful<\/a> in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling \u2014 I don\u2019t see picking up soybeans with tweezers<\/a>, block-building, or powder-weighing<\/a> becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhile many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
These less standard offerings spoke to the real purpose of the games: getting robots out of the lab and into the messy real-world environments their makers hope they will ultimately work in. And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
For all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years. Records fell, with one humanoid running the 100-meter sprint<\/a> in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt\u2019s 2009 world record. Another bot reached<\/a> 2.88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993. Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago<\/a>, when even the most advanced machines struggled<\/a> to stay upright.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBut the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful<\/a> in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling \u2014 I don\u2019t see picking up soybeans with tweezers<\/a>, block-building, or powder-weighing<\/a> becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhile many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
But the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful<\/a> in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling \u2014 I don\u2019t see picking up soybeans with tweezers<\/a>, block-building, or powder-weighing<\/a> becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhile many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
While many events required<\/a> robots to operate autonomously \u2014 including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events \u2014 others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
Beijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government\u2019s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed<\/a> another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel<\/a> next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChina was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIn part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
China was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward \u2014 both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams<\/a> were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according<\/a> to state-run China Daily. <\/em>While there doesn\u2019t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
Nevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country\u2019s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment<\/a>, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nIt\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
It\u2019s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would\u2019ve changed much. The US still has an edge<\/a> in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention<\/a> to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports<\/a> even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots<\/a>, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nCatching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n
Catching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there\u2019s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI<\/a> as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing<\/a>; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDARPA still runs<\/a> robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention<\/a> a decade ago. <\/span><\/li>\nWhen the US government banned foreign robots, it didn\u2019t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds. It banned Roombas<\/a> too, reports The Verge<\/em>\u2019s own Sean Hollister. <\/span><\/li>\n\u201cThe brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,\u201d writes Business Insider<\/em>\u2019s Lloyd Lee in a report<\/a> setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain. <\/span><\/li>\nUnlike language models, you can\u2019t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores<\/a>, or send someone to your house to film<\/a> them doing them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/a> and the South China Morning Post<\/em><\/a> both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. <\/span><\/li>\nWhy do we keep laughing when robots fail? An old but still good exploration of that shared joy<\/a> in vintage Vice<\/em>. <\/span><\/li>\nYou can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge<\/em> alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper\u2019s<\/em> feature<\/a> outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry. <\/span><\/li>\nI\u2019m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too<\/a>, as I did with Casio\u2019s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFollow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/svg><\/span>Robert Hart<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n