The move comes after China successfully displayed its humanoid technology at the Spring Festival gala earlier in February. Provinces such as Anhui, Zhejiang, and Shandong are establishing robot training centers in rapid succession to accelerate the commercialization of emerging robotics technologies.As of now, a training center in Shandong is tutoring dozens of humanoids in basic tasks such as carrying trays, folding clothes, and retrieving water from shelves.
SsooooOriginal on
Every passing day means another day of training data being made for robots only they have the ability to churn out.
Is China about to pull the rug and lead by example by figuring out how to manage a populace with UBI?
RichardDr on
the part that’s easy to overlook here is that the robots aren’t the product — the training data is. every hour a humanoid spends folding clothes or carrying trays in these centers generates interaction data that makes the next generation of robots better. and china just turned that into a nationalized infrastructure project across multiple provinces simultaneously.
the US has Figure, Tesla Optimus, a handful of startups doing similar training in controlled environments. china is doing it as coordinated government policy with dedicated facilities in Shandong, Anhui, Zhejiang. that’s a fundamentally different scale.
traditional industrial robots were programmed with specific movement paths. these humanoids are learning generalized manipulation skills through demonstration — closer to how we train neural networks than how we program CNC machines. whoever accumulates the most hours of robot-environment interaction data first builds a moat that’s incredibly hard to cross later.
also worth noting this follows the same playbook as EV batteries and solar panels. subsidize the infrastructure, eat the losses early, dominate the supply chain once costs come down. except the “supply chain” here is trained embodied AI.
LuckyandBrownie on
Humanoid robots are dumb. They are worse at everything compared to a task specific robot. It is a marketing ploy.
AlexWorkGuru on
The interesting part isn’t the schools themselves, it’s that China is treating robot training as an institutional problem rather than a purely technical one. Most Western approaches assume you solve robotics in simulation and then deploy. China is building the physical infrastructure to collect real-world training data at scale.
Whether that actually works is a different question. Factory floors are weirdly adversarial environments… things fall, lighting changes, humans do unexpected stuff. The gap between “walks across a clean room” and “works a full shift” is enormous.
5 Comments
The move comes after China successfully displayed its humanoid technology at the Spring Festival gala earlier in February. Provinces such as Anhui, Zhejiang, and Shandong are establishing robot training centers in rapid succession to accelerate the commercialization of emerging robotics technologies.As of now, a training center in Shandong is tutoring dozens of humanoids in basic tasks such as carrying trays, folding clothes, and retrieving water from shelves.
Every passing day means another day of training data being made for robots only they have the ability to churn out.
Is China about to pull the rug and lead by example by figuring out how to manage a populace with UBI?
the part that’s easy to overlook here is that the robots aren’t the product — the training data is. every hour a humanoid spends folding clothes or carrying trays in these centers generates interaction data that makes the next generation of robots better. and china just turned that into a nationalized infrastructure project across multiple provinces simultaneously.
the US has Figure, Tesla Optimus, a handful of startups doing similar training in controlled environments. china is doing it as coordinated government policy with dedicated facilities in Shandong, Anhui, Zhejiang. that’s a fundamentally different scale.
traditional industrial robots were programmed with specific movement paths. these humanoids are learning generalized manipulation skills through demonstration — closer to how we train neural networks than how we program CNC machines. whoever accumulates the most hours of robot-environment interaction data first builds a moat that’s incredibly hard to cross later.
also worth noting this follows the same playbook as EV batteries and solar panels. subsidize the infrastructure, eat the losses early, dominate the supply chain once costs come down. except the “supply chain” here is trained embodied AI.
Humanoid robots are dumb. They are worse at everything compared to a task specific robot. It is a marketing ploy.
The interesting part isn’t the schools themselves, it’s that China is treating robot training as an institutional problem rather than a purely technical one. Most Western approaches assume you solve robotics in simulation and then deploy. China is building the physical infrastructure to collect real-world training data at scale.
Whether that actually works is a different question. Factory floors are weirdly adversarial environments… things fall, lighting changes, humans do unexpected stuff. The gap between “walks across a clean room” and “works a full shift” is enormous.