Comment by saturn8601
4 days ago
Chinese work ethic driven by overproduction of STEM majors leading to 25% youth unemployment...also they probably stole a lot of the fundamental stuff that was super hard to produce but easy to copy and build on top of.
On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.
Their earlier robots (A1, Go 1) have a lot of lineage from Ben Kats' (from MIT) Mini Cheetah project, even down to the shape of the communication protocols used for motor control. I've not had the chance to closely inspect their newer robots, so I can't tell you what's their secret sauce, but I suspect it has as much to do with RL-based control and software as it does with hardware improvements.
I often hear about "muh china stealing", two questions come to mind:
1. how could they steal something that western companies dont even have yet?
2. for more fundamental stuff, western companies did transfer knowledge themselves by moving factories to China, in exchange for decades of access to China market and exorbitant profits they earned. Where exactly is "supposed stealing" in unitree ?
Boston Dynamics has been at the game for a LONG time (1992 vs Unitree's 2016). During that time they slogged through a lot of fundamental work that from the outside looked like 0 but thats the thing about tech, it starts at 0.01% then increases 0.01% → 0.02% → 0.04% → 0.08% → 0.16% → 0.32% → 0.64% and so on. The world just sees 0 until they don't. If you are able to just take all the results of those years and skip the same effort required then combined with your own skilled and motivated people you can leapfrog them.
(Im basically rewording my original comment, you didn't get my point the first time)
The answer to both your questions, and the poster's obvious implication, is that somehow they stole information from Boston Dynamics. (I'm not saying I believe that.) Seems like they must've stolen the information at the exact point in time when advances in AI made these physical robots much more easy for anyone to engineer without theft...
Steal info from 10 different companies, and combine it to make a product better than any of the 10 individual products copied.
It's basically the patent problem.
US patents do not have extra-territorial power, meaning US patent means nothing outside its borders, unless there are mutual reciprocity agreements (mostly between US and its vassal puppet states).
To my knowledge, China has never been caught infringing on US patents on US soil. A lot of Chinese innovations are simply orders of magnitude better than any US alternative, for example TikTok's algorithm and TikTok as a short-video social network.
So please answer my question, how could China steal anything that either 1) Western companies explicitly granted as part of Joint Venture corporation, 2) Western companies havent even developed themselves, and at best, only possess inferior version, generation or two behind the state of the art?
in IP realm, India for example forcefully nationalizes all pharmaceutical IP and produces generics of brand name drugs for its internal market (1970 Patents Act)
Idk about work ethic, but what are the chances it's a 996 company?
All Chinese companies are 996 companies and any that arent will eventually be replaced by a 996 company. Again vast oversupply of STEM labor serves as a forcing function(but is not the only reason).