Unitree Founder Wang Xingxing Discusses Humanoid Robot Progress and Physical AI
At the 2026 World Physical AI Conference, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing announced that the Unitree G1 has achieved a cumulative production of 10,000 to 20,000 units, making it the world's best-selling humanoid robot. He also revealed that advanced language models can now perform zero-shot robotic control for complex tasks such as painting and playing Go. This milestone highlights the rapid commercial scaling of humanoid robots and demonstrates how general-purpose artificial intelligence models are increasingly capable of directly driving physical machinery without task-specific training. These advancements bring the robotics industry closer to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and enhancing real-world productivity. Unitree is currently developing a physical AI self-evolution system called 'Unitree Preview,' which allows AI models to autonomously gather research papers, write code, train in simulation, and test in real-world environments. Wang predicts that within one to two years, robots will be able to execute roughly 80% of tasks simply through natural language voice commands.
## BACKGROUND
Zero-shot control refers to the ability of an AI model to successfully perform a task it has never explicitly been trained or fine-tuned to execute before. Physical AI bridges digital machine learning models with physical hardware to interact intelligently with the real-world environment.