But what truly captivated the audience was not the actions themselves — it was what happened next. Spectators repeatedly moved the bread aside, shifted the kettle, rearranged cups and plates, and covered the cup lids with their hands, creating obstacle after obstacle. Yet the robot never wavered. It relocated its targets in milliseconds, reconstructed its path on the fly and completed every step without interruption.

　　Wang outlined a roadmap for general-purpose embodied intelligence foundation models. He said that building a unified "brain and cerebellum" — the embodied intelligence foundation model — to achieve a deep understanding of human movement and control mechanisms represents a critical technological pathway for pushing humanoid robots toward the "tipping point" of artificial general intelligence.

　　Just a day before the WAIC opened, Vice-Minister of Industry and Information Technology Ke Jixin revealed at the annual plenary session of his ministry"s humanoid robot and embodied intelligence standardization technical committee in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, that China"s humanoid robot output reached about 20,000 units last year, surpassed 40,000 units in the first half of this year, and is expected to exceed 100,000 units this year.

　　This fivefold jump sends a clear signal: humanoid robots are accelerating from technological exploration toward standardized, large-scale development. But quantity expansion does not equal industrial maturity.

　　Xie Shaofeng, chairman of the ministry"s technical committee and chairman of the OpenAtom Foundation, warned that the industry is currently "blossoming yet fighting separately". Behind the apparent prosperity are three major challenges: highly divergent technological pathways, a critical lack of product standards and mounting pressure from sustainable development requirements.