Aug 21 (Reuters) – Humanoid robot brains could see a breakthrough by late next year similar to the dramatic impact ChatGPT had on AI usage, the CEO of Chinese embodied AI startup ACE Robotics said on Friday
“We expect to reach the ‘ChatGPT moment’ for embodied intelligence by the end of next year, driven by world models and environmental data capture,” Wang Xiaogang told Reuters.
“Even if we reach that inflection point by late 2027, it will likely take another four to five years to see broad commercial implementation of embodied world models across sectors,” said Wang, who is also a co-founder of Chinese AI visual recognition pioneer SenseTime.
While large language models such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek have become a staple in workplaces and households globally, AI models that allow a robot to smoothly complete a wide range of tasks in unfamiliar physical environments remain distant.
And as more companies in China’s fledgling humanoid robot industry seek funding and high valuations, investors are placing more importance on real-world deployment over activities such as dance or athletics to demonstrate their economic value.
Embodied AI models determine the intelligence and autonomous operation abilities of robots. Unlike large language models, these physical AI simulation systems are designed to help robots understand and navigate real-world environments in real time.
Wang Xingxing, the founder of China’s Unitree, this week predicted that robot brains could see a dramatic breakthrough in two to three years at the earliest. He and other Chinese robotics CEOs have acknowledged that acquiring high-quality real-life training data for these models remains a bottleneck.
ACE Robotics, which was founded in July 2025 and is backed by Ant Group and SenseTime, has raised more than $100 million in the first half of this year through several financing rounds.
Wang said it aims to launch an initial public offering (IPO) “as early as permitted”. Chinese listing rules typically require companies to have at least three fiscal years of operation.
The company’s open-s, outperforming world models such as Nvidia’s Cosmos 3 and Ant Group’s Lingbot despite having a much smaller 4 billion parameter count
The world model integrates perception, multi-modal understanding, physical simulation and action planning. It can also generate long-horizon video and action predictions over multi-minute sequences.
