The humanoid robot of the future is a hulking specimen with a body that’s made in China and a brain that runs on American silicon.
This week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, announced a blueprint for the bot, which combines a few different things: a 6-foot, 150-pound robot called H2 Plus from Unitree, a high-flying Chinese robotics startup; a Thor T5000 Nvidia chip; an advanced humanoid hand; and a new suite of software, which makes it easy to program and train the machine. Taken together, they’ll make it easier for researchers, including US academic labs, to put together cutting-edge humanoids and train them with their own AI algorithms.
The Thor chip can run powerful AI models that allow the bot to make sense of its environment and control its movements, while the body features Unitree’s motors, actuators, and sensors. The dextrous, humanlike hand from Singaporean company Sharpa can do everything from card tricks to peeling an apple. (Dexterity remains a key unsolved problem in robotics.)
Spencer Huang, Nvidia’s director of product for robotics, told WIRED that the company wants to provide its silicon smarts for as many humanoid companies as possible. “Unitree is the first, but they’re not going to be the last by a long shot,” Huang said. (Yes, he’s Jensen’s son.) He added that the technology in H2 could potentially make other Chinese robots, including conventional industrial arms, more capable.
In some ways, the partnership is unexpected: Robotics has emerged as a critical new arena for US-China techno-competition, and some politicians have proposed banning Chinese humanoids altogether. Last year, security researchers claimed that Unitree’s robots were capable of capturing and transmitting data, raising security risks.
But in other ways, the team-up makes perfect sense. “This is a fascinating development,” says Scott Singer, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies AI governance and China. Singer notes that while the US has the world’s best AI chips, China’s supply chain gives its robotics companies a hardware edge. “Both sides have key parts of the supply chain that they might be able to weaponize, but here they are working together,” he says.
Courtesy of NVIDIA
Nvidia, for its part, appears to be aware of the security concerns. Besides nimble fingers and a new brain, the new H2 Plus blueprint comes with security features that seem designed to reassure users that their data and models are safe.
Nvidia’s chips are currently the gold standard for training large AI models, and the company has made big efforts to move into advanced robotics by developing specialized hardware and software tools. The US government bars Nvidia from selling its most capable chips to China but late last year loosened restrictions to allow it to sell more advanced chips there.
Singer says that robots and AI are widely seen as key to manufacturing and economic productivity, future military capabilities, and advances in AI itself. He believes it will be crucial for the US to figure out how to foster its own robotics industry, which might well mean finding ways of working with Chinese manufacturers.
Unitree’s robots are already hugely popular inside China and abroad; they’re relatively easy to program and remarkably cheap. A base version of the G1 humanoid costs around $15,000, compared with competitors’ robots that can run several hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Unitree’s bots can often be seen doing parkour, kung-fu, and other acrobatic feats in social media videos, and they’re featured in research published by many Western labs.
Not everyone is enthused to see Chinese robot makers grow rapidly. Gavin Kenneally, cofounder and CEO of Ghost Robotics, which makes legged robots for defense and security, says he believes Unitree’s technology has drawn extensively on innovations from Western labs. He adds that it will be crucial that the US does not allow China to dominate the market for humanoids or any other robots.
“Without a serious near-term policy response, including a national robotics strategy, the US risks ceding the commercial robotics market to Unitree and other Chinese companies, as we’ve already seen happen in the drone space with DJI,” he says.
But Nvidia’s CEO sees plenty of upside to working with Chinese robot makers. “Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world’s largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity,” Huang said.
This is an edition of Will Knight’s AI Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
