Fantastic future

If this is the quiet, repetitive work of training humanoid robots, the public recently witnessed a surprising spectacle.

During this year's televised Spring Festival Gala, they snapped off backflips in crisp succession and sparred with human performers without missing a beat.

The speed of androids' evolution has outpaced the public's imagination of how quickly the technology is supposed to advance, which begs a practical question — "When will I be able to buy one as a housekeeper?"

Watching the gala, Zhang Wenshan, a 42-year-old accountant from Shandong province, was stunned by the performance of the robots. She opened the Taobao app on her phone and searched for the keyword "robot nanny".

She imagined a versatile robot housekeeper capable of looking after her elderly mother, who has high blood pressure, picking up her 14-year-old child from hobby classes, and walking her dogs twice a day.

"When you become a middle-aged working woman, you carry much more burden. Your child is preparing for high school entrance exams. Your parents are getting old and need care. Hiring a nanny to handle all of these is expensive, even more than my salary … If I had a robot nanny, it could save me from being a housewife," she said.

She said she would be willing to spend her entire annual salary — about 100,000 yuan ($14,300) — if it could ease her household pressures.

However, scientists said the gap between flawless stage performances and a functional household helper remains wide. Before these machines can enter daily life, they said, the technology needs time to mature.

"Repeated rehearsals can produce a one-time perfect performance," said Yan Weixin, chief scientist at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. "But replicating the same feats in factories and homes, where countless unexpected situations arise, is a different matter."

The robots on the gala stage, experts said, displayed striking advances in their "cerebellum". Their movements were fluid, coordinated and even expressive.

But the routines were meticulously preprogrammed. Without a capable "brain" to interpret new situations, they are, in effect, marionettes, they said.

Embodied intelligence

The primary bottleneck to full android functionality is not the body but the brain. That is why data centers are essential to humanoid robot development, experts explained.

For years, researchers have dreamed of enabling robots to think for themselves. The rapid development of artificial intelligence has given scientists hope that this gap can be closed.

Their goal is what they call "embodied intelligence". In simple terms, AI will no longer be confined to chatbots but will inhabit a physical form, perceiving, acting and making decisions in the real world.

"Embodied intelligence is an emerging industry where AI and robotics are deeply integrated. AI models act as the brain, responsible for thinking, while robots are responsible for moving and doing," said Leng Xiaokun, founder and chairman of Leju Robotics.

Embodied intelligence is now in a period of technological exploration. Multiple pathways are being tested, but one consensus is emerging — high-quality data will determine whether robots can leave the lab and enter society, Leng said.

Large language models are trained on vast oceans of text and images scraped from the internet. Robots, by contrast, cannot learn to move from words alone. They need real-world experience or high-fidelity simulations that approximate it at scale, said Chen Xiaobo, a senior engineer at a Beijing-based AI startup.

Wang from the data center said the instructor team already numbers more than 200 and will continue to expand. The center can produce more than 8 million multimodal data records annually.

The company said it has participated in the construction of nine humanoid robot training facilities nationwide, including the center in Shijingshan, making it the country's largest provider of embodied real-machine data. It also produces nearly 25 million real-machine data records annually.

The data, Wang said, not only supports the company's in-house robot development — using real-world feedback to continuously optimize robot brains — but can also be tailored to customer needs for targeted training. It is also supplied to AI model companies and data trading firms.