Wang Xingxing delivers speech at the 2026 World Robot Conference on August 20, 2026. Photo: Tao Mingyang/GT

A robot that can be dropped into an unfamiliar environment — including a home — and complete around 80 percent of tasks would mark the "ChatGPT moment" for humanoid robots, a tipping point the industry could reach in two to three years, Wang Xingxing, founder and chairman of Unitree Robotics, said on Thursday.

Wang made the remarks during a speech themed "From Exhibits to Products: The Next Decade of the Humanoid Robot Industry" at the ongoing 2026 World Robot Conference (WRC). It was his first public address since Unitree's stock listing on Wednesday.

The company has spent years pushing robots into real-world use, Wang said, citing deployments on automotive production lines and trials at its own factories, while its AI teams work on getting robots to perform household chores. But Unitree has held off on large-scale rollout, he said, because overall efficiency and generalization capability remain insufficient.

Reaching the "ChatGPT moment" for embodied AI will take two to three years under ideal conditions, Wang said. He defined the milestone as robots completing roughly 80 percent of tasks across 80 percent of unfamiliar settings, guided only by voice or text instructions.

The core challenge at present is aligning the inputs and outputs of large AI models with physical robots, Wang said. "When a robot reaches for an object, it looks like it has almost got hold of it — but that last bit of tactile feedback, that final small margin of error, it cannot correct," he said. The residual error goes unresolved and the success rate collapses, he added, calling this the biggest bottleneck facing embodied AI worldwide.

Wang showcased software under development at the company that allows developers to program and simulate a humanoid robot's movements on a computer before testing them on physical machines, a workflow he said would raise development efficiency.

Unitree Robotics on Wednesday became the first humanoid robot maker to list on China's A-share market. Its shares closed up 460.34 percent, valuing the Hangzhou-based company at 340 billion yuan ($50.42 billion). Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025.