Robotics companies developing "AI brains" for machines are racing to catch up with the rapid progress made in large language models, but experts warn that the sector remains in an early, immature phase. This was underscored this week when Unitree, China's leading robot maker, lost nearly half its market value shortly after a blockbuster IPO valued the firm at $66 billion, as analysts pointed to robots' continued inability to perform genuinely useful, value-creating work despite improving physical capabilities.

At last week's Actuate conference, a gathering for developers building robot AI systems, attendance had tripled since 2023 to around 1,500 people, reflecting soaring interest, but also exposed a persistent "robotics data crisis" — a shortage of high-quality training data. One founder, Harry Mellsop of simulation-tools startup Antioch, likened the field's current state to "GPT-2 era" language models, saying more data, compute and better simulation hardware are needed to progress. Autonomous vehicle firms are seen as furthest ahead, thanks to abundant real-world driving data, and companies including Tesla, Wayve and Uber are now applying that expertise to humanoid robotics projects, though some, like Genesis AI's CEO, argue it remains too early to settle on a single hardware approach.