March 18, 2026 – At the 2026 Yabuli Forum Annual Meeting, which kicked off in Yabuli, Heilongjiang, China, on March 17, Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree Technology, delivered an opening speech in his new capacity as a forum council member.
During his speech, Wang made bold predictions about the development of humanoid robots. He noted that although current robots are still unable to outpace humans in a 100 – meter sprint, by the middle of this year, robots worldwide, especially those in China, are expected to achieve this milestone. He anticipated that the 100 – meter dash time of robots could drop below 10 seconds, surpassing Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58 seconds.
A search revealed that in August 2025, the Unitree H1 robot set a speed record for humanoid robots at 3.3 meters per second. In February 2026, the Chinese – made robot “Bolt” reached a peak speed of 10 meters per second during testing, getting close to Bolt’s instantaneous speed of 10.44 meters per second.
When discussing when the “ChatGPT moment” in the field of embodied artificial intelligence would arrive, Wang believed that it was still a bit premature. He analyzed that there were three major challenges at present. Firstly, the generalization ability of AI models was insufficient, and it was necessary to enhance the generalization ability of humanoid robots or embodied AI and the richness of their action expressions. Secondly, data in the robotics field was scarce, and the key was how to improve data utilization with limited data. Thirdly, the scale effect of reinforcement learning still needed to be further enhanced.
Despite these difficulties, Wang held a relatively optimistic view on the breakthrough time. He said that while some were overly optimistic, estimating it would take 18 months, he was a bit more pessimistic, believing it might take 2 to 3 years. However, he emphasized that the overall progress would still be extremely rapid.
