From The Guardian, March 19:
How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? I visited 11 companies in five Chinese cities to find out
Chen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but when he is in his element – up close with the technology he builds, or in business meetings discussing the imminent replacement of human workers by robots – he wears an exuberant smile that brings to mind an intern on his first day at his dream job. Guchi makes the machines that install wheels, dashboards and windows for many of the top Chinese car brands, including BYD and Nio. He took the name from the Chinese word guzhi, “steadfast intelligence”, though the fact that it sounded like an Italian luxury brand was not entirely unwelcome.
For the better part of two decades, Chen has tried to solve what, to him, is an engineering problem: how to eliminate – or, in his view, liberate – as many workers in car factories as technologically possible. Late last year, I visited him at Guchi headquarters on the western outskirts of Shanghai. Next to the head office are several warehouses where Guchi’s engineers tinker with robots to fit the specifications of their customers. Chen, an engineer by training, founded Guchi in 2019 with the aim of tackling the hardest automation task in the car factory: “final assembly”, the last leg of production, when all the composite pieces – the dashboard, windows, wheels and seat cushions – come together. At present, his robots can mount wheels, dashboards and windows on to a car without any human intervention, but 80% of the final assembly, he estimates, has yet to be automated. That is what Chen has set his sights on.
As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China. But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work. The technology behind China’s current robotics boom is deep learning, the mathematical engine behind large language models such as ChatGPT, which learn by discerning patterns from huge datasets. Many researchers believe that machines can learn to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned to navigate language: not by following rules, but by absorbing enough data for something like human dexterity to emerge. The aim, for many technologists, is the development of humanoid robots capable of performing factory labour – work that employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
The resources being pumped into achieving this goal are staggering. In 2025, China announced a £100bn fund for strategic technologies including quantum computing, clean energy and robotics. Major cities have invested their own resources into robotics projects, too. There are now roughly 140 Chinese firms hoping to build humanoids. Some of the frontrunners made their debut in February, at the lunar new year festival gala, a state-choreographed spectacle loosely comparable to the Super Bowl in terms of bombast and national significance. Hundreds of millions watched as robots performed comedy sketches and martial arts routines. The speed of progress has been startling. Last year, the robots were doing a synchronised cheerleading routine. This year, they did cartwheels and parkour. The intended message was clear: the robots are coming, and China will be the nation building them.
A world in which AI-powered humanoid robots are produced at scale still seems to belong in the realm of science fiction. Late last year, I visited 11 robotics companies in China across five cities to try to grasp just how close we are to the robot future. I met many ambitious entrepreneurs, who were operating in an environment so deeply integrated with municipal governments that the distinction between private and public was losing its meaning. All of them were engaged, in different ways, in the race to build and commercialise robots capable of replacing human workers – and some of them already have eager western buyers.
Inside one of the Guchi Robotics warehouses, a team of employees from General Motors was testing Guchi’s wheel-installation machines ahead of a shipment to Canada. The hull of a white GM truck occupied a raised platform at the centre of the room. The truck, surrounded by four large robotic arms and a jungle of wires, sat inside a yellow safety enclosure made of steel bars. I watched on the sidelines as a bearded GM engineer tinkered with a control panel outside the steel cage.
The engineer, an American man whom I’ll call Jack, worked in GM’s “manufacturing optimisation” division. “To be grim, anything that eliminates people from the production line is basically my job,” Jack told me. General Motors sets job-reduction targets for his division each year, he said, which requires eliminating a set number of factory workers across all plants in North America. His team chose Guchi over a German-based competitor – itself 95% owned by a Chinese company – because the other couldn’t offer a moving assembly line, Jack explained. The purchase of the Guchi machines, he said, would eliminate 12 assembly operators on the line at a single factory. (General Motors did not confirm the job-reduction targets, but a spokesperson said it implements technology to help improve safety, efficiency and quality, “particularly for physically demanding or repetitive tasks.”)
An irony of the Trump administration’s mission to revive industrial production within the US is that much of the machinery required to make America great again comes from the country that motivated America’s industrial revival in the first place. China now accounts for more than half of the world’s new factory robot installations annually. Chen thinks Chinese and American engineers are comparable in skill and talent. “The difference is really just cost and speed, and how many people you can throw at a problem – we might have 1,000 who can do this work, and they might have 100,” he said.
Chen and I walked to the end of the warehouse, where we now had a frontal view of the GM truck. After watching Jack work for a bit, Chen pointed me to the robotic arms on each side of the car body: “You see those? This is the screwdriving robot. Even if manufacturing does come back to North America, they won’t be putting workers on the line to fasten screws any more. They’ll use robots.”
I wasn’t so sure. Wasn’t one reason that Americans elected Trump because they wanted their blue-collar jobs back? Chen thought this was pure illusion. The world had changed, and so had young people. Chen told me to think about China, where factory culture is deeply ingrained but young Chinese are increasingly reluctant to tolerate the drudgery. “It’s just how people are wired now.” If even Chinese people aren’t willing to do factory work any more, Chen was saying, why would Americans?
One week after my visit to Guchi HQ, I met Chen in north-west Beijing, where the city’s top universities are located. He had invited me to a meeting at the head office of Galbot, one of China’s most hyped humanoid robotics startups. One of its wheeled humanoids appeared in a skit at this year’s lunar new year jamboree, where it handed a male actor a bottle of water from a shelf and folded laundry. Since its founding in 2023, Galbot has pursued a less showy strategy than many of its competitors: building robots that can perform mundane tasks such as picking up items and setting them down elsewhere safely and reliably. The founder, Wang He, told a Chinese reporter recently that their robots are already deployed in several Chinese car factories, though videos appear to show them in highly controlled settings.
Galbot’s “pick-and-place” robots might seem a lot dumber than their backflipping rivals, but a crucial difference is that the robot acrobats operate according to pre-programmed instructions: they are feats of motion control and balance, but they do not go off-script. The kind of technology being developed at Galbot is what roboticists call a vision-language-action model (VLA), which aims to allow machines to operate in unfamiliar and fluid environments, just as humans do. For now, Galbot’s robots cannot reliably do what, for humans, would be trivial tasks – say, washing the dishes – but Wang, has told Chinese reporters he aims to have 10,000 robots handling basic retail and factory work in three years. (Some AI pioneers, such as Yann LeCun, are extremely sceptical that the current paradigm of deep learning will deliver the results companies such as Galbot hope for.)....
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