Wang Xingxing bets on GPT-7 for embodied AI as Unitree's valuation slides
At the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai on Oct 12, 2026, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said robots could go from showpieces to products "in as little as one or two years," arguing that GPT-7, due next year, may crack embodied intelligence outright; he added that deploying GPT-6 on the company's robots for task tests worked "very well." In the same week, Unitree closed at 436.63 yuan on Oct 13, down more than 61% from its debut intraday high of 1,100 yuan on Oct 8, while JPMorgan initiated coverage with an underweight rating and a 300 yuan target. The signed column argues the real bottleneck is not model scale but the data modality needed for contact dynamics—friction cones, force closure and deformable-object manipulation—which can only be recollected from the physical world, making a timeline pegged to external model vendors' release cadence unreliable.
It ties embodied-AI commercialization timelines directly to frontier-model release cadence, and highlights how hard such companies are for investors to model.