China and the Robot Shop on the Corner » Enrique Dans

If there’s anything surprising about the World Robot Conference taking place in Beijing this week, it’s the sheer number of Chinese companies, nearly thirty, showing off humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus and others designed to replace human workers in factories and warehouses.

A progress that is clearly surprising: while in the Western world a few companies are still competing with robots that are still at a relatively experimental stage, in China we see a large number of companies, and what’s more, most of them are working with Chinese technology, presumably more limited due to restrictions imposed by the United States.

The reality is that the lack of access to the most powerful chips on the market is forcing Chinese manufacturers to either access them through cloud computing providers for some tasks, such as training their algorithms, or when it comes to integrating them into hardware As with robotics, doing more with less means writing more efficient code to achieve LLMs that allow us to cope with the limited number of learning cycles that less complex semiconductors entail. Other companies are building smaller, more specialized models, or using learning methods that require less time and energy. A clear case of frugality in innovation driven by an external constraint.

Either way, the result is that Chinese industry is apparently growing faster than Western industry, creating a much more competitive domestic environment. That’s where the bell comes in. catfish effectthe effect that a strong competitor causes a weak competitor to continually outperform itself. There are many versions of this story, both in Western culture and in Chinese and Japanese culture, but the one that gives it its name says that the captain of a Norwegian ship, reputed to be the one who brought back the best quality sardines, kept catfish in the tanks in which they were transported, meaning that the sardines were constantly on guard in the presence of a predator and, as a result, did not die from inaction. According to the Chinese government, allowing Tesla to open in Shanghai in 2019 was precisely aimed at forcing Chinese EV competitors to move faster by attracting the industry leader to its market, and it clearly worked: today, China produces more EVs than anyone else, and their market penetration is growing rapidly.

But the effect has been felt beyond the EV industry: When Tesla unveiled its Optimus robot in 2021, declaring that it would eventually become more important to the company than the EV business itself, it became another example that countless Chinese competitors have tried to emulate. Now, at the World Robot Conference in Shanghai, Optimus can be seen in a glass case with a sign next to him that reads, “There will be more than a thousand of my compatriots in the factory next year,” as one of the most talked about and photographed landmarks, but there are also a variety of Chinese humanoid robots that don’t stand in a glass case, but walk, wave, or gesture in various ways.

Right now, we can easily imagine a humanoid robot shop in any corner of a Chinese city, in the same style that Kazuo Ishiguro uses as a backdrop in Clara and the Sun, with its various technological generations succeeding each other and competing for the benefit of users. Such a scenario still seems relatively distant in the Western world, despite the availability of more efficient tools to make it happen.

China is a pioneer in the world in the installation of industrial robots. This technology was pioneered by Japan with Fanuc, Switzerland with ABB and Germany with Kuka (already in the hands of China). The country has almost 300,000 units of this type of robots installed, which is almost six times more than Japan and significantly ahead of other developed countries such as the United States, South Korea, Germany, Italy, etc. If it also manages to become a leader in the development of humanoid robots and use them in the same way, we will certainly be talking about a massive change in both Chinese society and its production capacity.

And all this without access to the supposedly most advanced chips, as a consequence of the US trade war policy. This is one of the logical consequences of restrictions: they force those who endure them to become more inventive and efficient if they want to compete. This seems to be the case not only in the field of generative models of artificial intelligence, but now also in the field of autonomous driving or robotics. A very interesting and revealing panorama: whoever owns the technologies of the future has a greater opportunity to master the future itself.