Unitree's Wang Xingxing: Physical AI Will Break Through in the Next Two to Three Years, and I'm Terrified of Wasting Even a Single Day

Author: Qiu Xiaofen Editor: Yuan Silai On October 22, Unitree Robotics held the "2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference" in Hangzhou. It was the first ecosystem partner conference the company has hosted since its founding ten years ago. At the conference, founder Wang Xingxing delivered a speech titled "Believe, Believe in AI as Much as Possible," sharing his views on the development of AI technology, Unitree's technical roadmap, and the future of the robotics industry. "Almost everyone in the world still doesn't take AI seriously enough, and doesn't believe in it enough, including myself," Wang Xingxing said. In his view, even though AI has become the most closely watched technology direction globally, people's understanding of its pace of development and potential impact remains insufficient. He offered an interesting example. About four or five years ago, he recommended some AI-related stocks to colleagues at the company. "If we had believed in AI more firmly a few years ago, the personal wealth of some Unitree employees might have grown tenfold or even dozens of times." Why, then, despite AI's rapid leaps forward, do ordinary people still not feel much change? Wang Xingxing believes it is because it typically takes five to ten years for a technology to move from breakthrough to genuine widespread adoption. He cited the internet as an example: from the internet bubble around 2000 to the gradual spread of applications such as e-commerce around 2010, the whole process took nearly a decade. Therefore, for the most advanced AI models to truly enter ordinary people's lives, similar time is needed for the impact to take hold. But in his view, this does not prevent AI from ultimately bringing enormous change. Accordingly, he constantly ponders one ultimate question: If AI is going to overturn everyone's life, what exactly is the most important opportunity within it? As the founder of a robotics company, he believes the opportunity lies in physical AI. Wang Xingxing even made a rather bold prediction: as the capabilities of general-purpose large models rapidly improve, physical AI could achieve a major breakthrough within the next one to three years. "If things go fast, one to two years; if slower, two to three years." Unitree displayed its newly released H2-X robot. GPT-6 Astra has a huge impact on embodied intelligence Wang Xingxing believes that GPT-6 Astra, released not long ago, has delivered a tremendous shock to the industry. Inside Unitree, the team has also tried using this model to run several robotics experiments. One of them involved having a robot paint. According to his description, Unitree did not write complex programs specifically for this painting task in advance, but simply...