Unitree's IPO made its founder $12 billion richer this week — then he said robots still can't think

Unitree's Shanghai IPO raised $904 million (6.1 billion yuan) and was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times, a STAR Market record.

Shares closed up 460% on debut, valuing Unitree at about $50 billion, before falling 11% the next trading day.

CEO Wang Xingxing says a robot 'ChatGPT moment' — hitting roughly 80% task success in an unfamiliar home — is 2 to 3 years away in the best case, 5 to 10 in the worst.

China delivered over 40,000 humanoid robots in the first half of 2026 alone, about 97% of the global total.

Unitree's own robots still need to be retrained from scratch for each new task — the opposite of how a language model actually generalizes.

My honest take

The most credible number in this whole story isn't the 460% or the $50 billion — it's Wang's own 2-to-10-year range, delivered days after his company's stock priced in a lot more certainty than…