Founder of Chinese startup Spirit AI says robot brains set for 2027 breakthrough

Humanoid robots need at least 8 years to enter households, robot co-founder says Spirit AI raised $670 million in two years, valued at $2.9 billion High-quality data is main bottleneck for training robot brains By Laurie Chen BEIJING, Sept 18 (Reuters) — Humanoid robot brains are likely to achieve a breakthrough as soon as mid-2027, but their deployment in homes could take at least eight years as model development faces a data bottleneck, leading Chinese embodied AI firm Spirit AI said this week. Despite impressive hardware advances allowing Chinese humanoids to sprint, dance and do backflips on command, Chinese robot firms are increasingly focusing on the software that determines robots' intelligence and their economic productivity in real-world settings. "The brain is indeed the weakest link in the complete robotics stack," Gao Yang, co-founder and chief scientist of Spirit AI, told Reuters at its Beijing offices on Thursday. An industry breakthrough comparable to OpenAI's landmark GPT-3.0 model, which powered ChatGPT, could come around mid-2027, said Gao. Spirit AI's robots have achieved a 90% success rate for simple tasks in structured living-room environments. "The next one to