A Chinese humanoid robot ran the 100-meter dash nearly two-tenths of a second faster than world-record holder Usain Bolt at Beijing’s “Robot Olympics” on Saturday.
A different class of achievement from Bolt’s, for obvious reasons, it improved upon last year’s fastest time by more than 10 seconds, highlighting China’s blistering progress in “embodied AI” as well as its remaining hurdles: The machine, which struggles to brake, crashed into a padded wall afterward.
The games have added to the hype of leading humanoid maker Unitree, whose founder and CEO has suggested the industry is still a decade away from its breakthrough “ChatGPT moment.”
China leads in mass-producing robots, but the US is believed to maintain an edge in the software powering their “brains.”