China's robots race ahead

theverge.com

5 pointsBrajeshwar3 comments

A new space race with robotics instead of rockets would do more good for the US economy than our current LLM version. Maybe in 10 years?

One of the things I keep running into in day to day work is that it seems increasingly thin the labor pools in the USA.

For example, getting developers with strong Healthcare / Pharmacy experience, with robotics to boot is nearly impossible. There's probably only 1,000 in the whole country. So we're forced to train up people. Our pay is quite competitive, for those wondering.

I can only imagine humanoid robotics is in even worse shape, and meanwhile in China theres probably one company with 1,000 engineers in it by itself. With 10 others all competing.

As more and more Boomers, and soon Gen X retire, we're going to be absolutely cooked on skilled labor.

China's biggest humanoid robot manufacturer is Unitree, who sold 5215 humanoid robots last year: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/R2t4zdvCZmWj_HpTRJAXzg According to the filing for their IPO this month, they had 175 R&D workers end of September 2025, 480 employees total: https://static.sse.com.cn/stock/disclosure/announcement/c/20... Of the 175, 4 PhDs, 69 master's degrees, 94 bachelor's degrees and 8 polytechnical school graduates. And of course they have to train new employees, too.

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