And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way. How it’s going For all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years.

39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt’s 2009 world record. 88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993.

Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago, when even the most advanced machines struggled to stay upright. But the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful in the real world.

The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling — I don’t see picking up soybeans with tweezers, block-building, or powder-weighing becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon. While many events required robots to operate autonomously — including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events — others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty.

The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes. What happens nextBeijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government’s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment.

The city has already confirmed another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel next year. China was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward — both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole.

The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other. In part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition.

Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according to state-run China Daily. While there doesn’t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.

Nevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country’s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble. It’s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would’ve changed much.

The US still has an edge in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware.

Some reports even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components. Catching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there’s still time to make up ground.

Washington is already treating other areas of AI as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.

By the wayDARPA still runs robotics challenges, but they drew far more attention a decade ago. When the US government banned foreign robots, it didn’t just ban humanoids and quadrupeds.

It banned Roombas too, reports The Verge’s own Sean Hollister. “The brains may come from the US, but the body could very well be Made In China,” writes Business Insider’s Lloyd Lee in a report setting out how the US could do with bolstering its hardware supply chain.

Unlike language models, you can’t simply scrape the internet to build an AI capable of interacting with the real world. A lot of that data has to be generated, which is why companies desperately want to film you doing chores, or send someone to your house to film them doing them.

Read thisThe Atlantic and the South China Morning Post both have great sets of pictures showing highlights of the games worth checking out. Why do we keep laughing when robots fail?

An old but still good exploration of that shared joy in vintage Vice. You can learn a lot about a robot by kicking it, says Verge alum James Vincent in an excellent Harper’s feature outlining the state of play in the humanoid industry.

I’m not only about robot fail videos. I can hate them in real life too, as I did with Casio’s fluffy AI pet thing, Moflin.

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