Wang Xingxing on Physical AI: Early Signs of a Breakthrough, With Model-Robot Alignment the Hard Part

At the 2026 World Physical AI Conference, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said physical AI is already showing early signs of being "broken through," with a breakthrough possibly arriving in the next 1-2 or 2-3 years. He believes the core challenge in embodied intelligence reaching its "ChatGPT moment" is aligning AI model inputs and outputs with real robots, and that commercial service scenarios will see deployment sooner than home and industrial ones. In internal tests, he said, GPT-6 deployed on a robot could clean paintbrushes on its own and continue painting without being specifically programmed to do so.