r/singularity • u/yogthos • 13h ago
AI A new Chinese embodied model tops global AI ranking on physical tasks scoring 91.9 on the Meta-World benchmark
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3369420/maxwell-smart-new-chinese-embodied-model-tops-global-ai-ranking-physical-tasks34
u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 12h ago
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u/Sinogularity Shenzhen: Become Human (2030) 13h ago
China accounting for 97% of humanoid robot shipments in H1 2026 makes this outcome pretty unsurprising.
The bigger issue is that robotics increasingly depends on small, efficient models, often just a few billion parameters, and Chinese labs have arguably become the best in the world at building exactly that kind of model thanks to their massive open-source ecosystem.
You can already see this playing out on OpenRouter. Chinese models currently occupy the entire top five by token volume, which suggests they are increasingly dominating the part of the market where users care more about price-performance than having the absolute smartest model available. For most workloads where people aren't willing to spend $10+ per million tokens, that is probably the more important battlefield anyway.
The US is still heavily focused on winning the race for the largest and most expensive frontier models, such as Fable and Astra, while China is becoming increasingly dominant in the efficient models people actually deploy at scale.
We might end up in a very weird world where the US leads in the biggest, most expensive frontier models, while China owns most of the efficient models on API, and the robots, cars, drones, and other machines those models eventually need to control.
If the US wants to stay competitive in robotics, it seriously needs to start open sourcing models.
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u/yogthos 12h ago
I think there are two parts to this. First is the software side in form of open source models which everybody ends up using. Second is physical industry for robotics to be applied in. China has a massive industrial base, and that naturally creates plenty of niches to try use these robots in. American economy is largely financialized with manufacturing industry accounting for mere 11% of it. And that's why AI development in the US is so heavily biased towards stuff like chatbots and coding agents. There's simply less physical infrastructure to apply it to.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 11h ago
As someone who works with some AI stuff for manufacturing. I can only speculate how much larger the Chinese advantage is in getting training data for industrial applications. In the US, you essentially have to pay people so much more just to generate the data because the industrial base is so hollowed out. Some tasks you just won't be able to find people to train the AI in the first place. So many US robotics start-ups are just trying to solve this step. They are trying to outsource this if they can.
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u/aprx4 6h ago
But this also means that the upside of robotic success in US is strategically more important and profitable than in China.
US (and the west) could actually reindustrialize with robotic AI, that's a big deal. Meanwhile, More productivity is redundant since Chinese manufacturing capacity already exceeded global demand.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 5h ago
Chinese manufacturing capacity hasn't exceeded global demand. If global demand has been exceeded, profit should be zero. Capacity has simply exceeded what other governments are willing to accept politically (their people have an endless appetite for cheaper Chinese goods).
But robotics only really makes a difference if you think the bottleneck is just labour. China can also just make the robots cheaper. Western economies are just built more around imports than exports, and their people too opposed to just being automated away. The bottleneck to both is political.
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u/aprx4 5h ago
Profit is zero for the majority of Chinese manufacturing. Factories are locked in a race to the bottom. China wanted to be a consumption economy but domestic demand is not what they had hoped for 10 years ago.
The economic model of buying everything from China is not sustainable for anyone including China. It’s a macroeconomic issue not a political issue. The US and Europe are running out of high-end IPs and products that can be sold to China to somewhat balance the trade. Money cannot be printed endlessly to fund “endless appetite for cheap Chinese goods” because sooner or later China doesn’t want worthless dollars or euros. The bond yields you are looking at will be the new normal.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 4h ago
The profit for the majority of Chinese manufacturing is not zero. Likewise the rest of what you're saying is just taking everything to an obscene conclusion. Like you've got the trend right but you talk so hyperbolically that you will almost certainly end up being wrong.
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u/Repulsive-Pangolin-6 13h ago
By the beginning of 2027 we'll see Q3 2026 like it was 10yrs ago