# Unitree's CEO Says Robotics Is Still Years From Its 'ChatGPT Moment,' Even as the Stock Soars

> Wang Xingxing, the founder of humanoid robot maker Unitree, tempered expectations for a breakthrough even as his company's newly listed shares posted a huge first week rally, according to Fortune.

- Source: Money Standard
- Canonical URL: https://moneystandard.co.uk/article/unitree-ceo-says-robotics-chatgpt-moment-is-still-years-away
- Author: Money Standard Newsroom
- Section: Business
- Published: 2026-08-19T10:19:38.681Z
- Updated: 2026-08-19T10:19:38.681Z
- Tags: Robotics

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Unitree founder Wang Xingxing told a robotics conference this week that the industry's version of a ChatGPT breakthrough, the moment robots become broadly useful without heavy retraining, is probably two to three years away at the earliest and could take five to ten, a more cautious timeline than the five year outlook he gave at the same event a year ago.

Wang defined that turning point as robots being able to handle roughly eighty percent of tasks in an unfamiliar setting, including a home, using nothing more than spoken or written instructions. Today's machines, he said, still need to be retrained for each new task and struggle to adapt on the fly, a gap he described as one of the industry's biggest obstacles.

The caution stands in contrast to Unitree's momentum. The company, founded a decade ago, became widely known after a viral dance routine performed by its humanoid robots at a televised gala last year, and this year's follow up performance added backflips and jumps between platforms. That visibility carried into Unitree's stock market debut this week, when the company raised about $900 million at a $9 billion valuation before shares briefly valued it at roughly $66 billion on their first day of trading, then slipped back over the following two sessions.

Wang said Unitree is now building a feedback loop in which its AI evaluates and scores the control code behind each robot's movements, working alongside human trainers to sharpen precision over time, part of a longer effort to close the gap between flashy demonstrations and everyday usefulness.

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Originally published by Money Standard. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://moneystandard.co.uk/article/unitree-ceo-says-robotics-chatgpt-moment-is-still-years-away.