Day three of the China AI delegation trip: humanoid robots, state-of-the-art open-source coding models, and conversational AI that controls your car.
Galbot
Galbot had a humanoid robot serving both coffee and food inside a Family Mart. They also showed their manufacturing applications - moving boxes, sorting parts - and, of course, a dancing humanoid.
Dancing is gimmicky, but the engineering behind a two-legged robot keeping its balance is genuinely insane - and that’s before it starts doing quality control on a factory floor.
The big insight from Galbot: the hardest problem in robotics isn’t the hardware anymore, it’s data. Specifically, closing the gap between simulation and the real world. They’re building a “world action model” to solve this, with a deep partnership with NVIDIA. Their business model is to provide an excellent base product and partner with businesses to build out specific vertical use cases with shared IP.
Z.AI
Z.AI was a completely different vibe to what I expected. They have GLM as their base model, which has hit state-of-the-art for open-source coding.
But a big part of their presentation was the ecosystem built on top, focused on sovereign AI deployments for entire countries. They provide the consulting to set up the talent, the data and the processing power so a country can run its own information locally. That’s not the typical Western view of Chinese AI, which is usually framed as being all about siphoning data. They’ve also launched a startup incubator that provides tokens, onboarding and an education community.
Baidu
Then Baidu. They’ve built their own version of Lovable called MeDo, where people build AI tools and actually sell them on a marketplace - full packaging into the app store, plus an enterprise version for internal company deployment.
They also have live e-commerce influencers that are entirely AI-generated, selling products. Even when they clearly state on the live stream that these are AI generated and not real, they get the same number of sales - and on some products, even higher.
We also got to demo their autonomous vehicles, which are controlled by voice. Ask it for a seat massage and it turns one on. The scale here is different to anything I’ve seen before.
