The question is, has China once again taken the lead in not only AI but of course in robotics?

This new video demonstration may actually convince you that China is currently leading the way in terms of fully autonomous humanoid style robotics, and it's actually very surprising at how good this is because I just didn't think we were that close to robots at this level.

Let's take a look at this demo and why this is so impressive.

Currently you can see that this is called the Astrobot S1, the next generation robot that is naturally yours, and everything you're about to see in this demo is at one time speed with no manipulation and it is fully autonomous.

Remember that because what you're about to see is rather fascinating.

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the Astrobot S1 coming from Shenzhen China.

Take a look at this first initial demo.

This is by far the most craziest thing I've ever seen.

The demo that you saw there, the reason this is so impressive and the reason that a lot of people don't even believe that this is real, is because what we're looking at is something that is extremely fast, extremely smooth.

It's fully autonomous, meaning that there is no teleoperation.

For those of you who are unaware, teleoperation just means that there is no human behind the machine controlling it with a VR headset as we've seen in many other robotics demos.

And some of the stuff that also makes this rather impressive was of course the Large Language Model integration.

I'm going to speak first about this right here because even as someone who pays attention to pretty much every AI and robotics development, this first demo here genuinely doesn't even seem real because of how quickly this is.

If you aren't familiar, this is a cup stacking game that many humans do play.

Of course, the goal is to stack this as fast as possible, which is pretty impressive for a robot that seems to be fully autonomous.

This is, of course, something that I would be honest with you guys, a lot of humans do struggle to do this.

This is definitely something that is rather impressive because it takes a certain technique to be able to pull the cloth from the glass like that.

When we do get into this area right here, this is of course where things start to get even more interesting because we can see that there is of course a Large Language Model integration, so the user first asks the AI system, What do you see?

And then it clearly states that I see an orange ping pong ball, a red race car toy, a white hello kitty figurine, a pink notebook, two white containers, and a red pen and laptop.

It's clearly identified all of the items in the system.

I mean, in the scene, but we can see here that this robotic system clearly has an onboard vision system.

It's onboard vision system, we aren't sure what it's using because they don't actually state which, of course, first LLM it is.

We don't know what LLM this is.

It could really be any onboard LLM, to be honest.

There are tons now, tons and tons and tons.

And with the rise of small Large Language Models, it could potentially be greatly improved in the future, as we've seen with releases such as PHY3.

We don't know what Large Language Model they're using, but they're also using some kind of vision system too.

Of course, what's also very impressive is that as this continues on, we can see here that the vision system actually does look similar to the YOLO vision system, which is a vision system that can identify tons and tons of different things.

And we can clearly see it managing to identify multiple different items.

What's also interesting is that we do see that it states here that how would you separate the items to tidy up the table, and then it says we need a container for the toys and a container for the writing utensils, stash stationary.

And I think that whilst, yes, of course, that is quite obvious to humans because we've done this a million different times, it's something that is increasingly good to see in robots because it shows the level of development and a small level of reasoning and understanding when combined with all of these different AI systems working together with a true humanoid robot.

They also stated that this was done via imitation learning.

I'm not sure how many examples they've managed to get, how many human demonstrations, but I'm guessing that it probably was a bunch considering the rate of speed when this robot is active and of course how good and smooth this robot is at completing the tasks because these tasks don't seem that they're really half done.

They do actually seem as if they're really, really done well.

And what's crazy about this is that we've seen a few robotics demos this year, and to be honest with you guys, this is by far the most impressive demo to date.

And this is just based on what we've seen.

And the craziest thing about this as well, and this is something that I've mentioned many times before, is that when looking at robotics demos, it's pretty surprising with what robots are simply able to do with this two-pronged approach.

Because many, many individuals would state that humanoid robots, in order to function effectively, you need five fingers just like a human uses.

But it's clear from many, many different robotics demos that that might not be the very best approach.

Sometimes keeping things simple and smooth can truly work wonders for what you're trying to do.

And taking a look at this, we can see that, of course, this is exactly the case with this level of robotics.

Whilst, some people might argue that with some robotics demos, the problem with this is that they are, and I guess you could say, controlled environments where objects are placed down, and of course, things are done in a pre, not pre-programmed, but pre-set routine where they've gone through the demonstrations many times.

But I have to be honest, doing something like this where you have a paper plane being thrown into a bin, that is something that honestly, for any robot to do, along with the other tasks, is very, very impressive.

And of course, as well, tasks like this, which don't seem that impressive, I think are truly, truly impressive because it's literally cutting vegetables.

Another thing that I would like to find out about this robot is if this robot does have a moving base or if it does have any legs.

Because whilst, yes, we can see from the top of the robot, we can see that it does have two arms and a vision system hooked up to the back.

In order for this robotic system to be useful in the future, we're going to have to see if this thing can move around.

With this astrobot, it's actually not to be confused with the commonly looked at reflex robot.

I'm only showing this because this is what the robot isn't, although it does look like this robot here.

This robot here is by another different company, and this robot is actually completely tele-operated.

There is a human controlling this.

This is not fully autonomous, but I'm guessing that this is going to be the same kind of architecture that astrobot uses when they're deploying their robots around the world.

And of course, like I said before, this is going to be pretty, pretty incredible because this is something that we haven't seen yet in terms of just the sheer speed and the fluidity of these models.

I've got to be completely honest with you guys, this definitely took me completely by surprise due to the fluidity, the speed, and not only that, the craziest thing about this demo was that there were many several different examples of what this robot could do.

It wasn't just one or two, but there were several instances of it being able to do complicated and intricate tasks that even some humans might actually find pretty difficult.

One thing that I'm looking forward to from this robot, in fact, two things are number one, is with this robot being combined with an actual LLM system, one thing that I would like to see in the future is, of course, this robot potentially using that LLM to verbally speak with commands and have humans interact with it on a verbal basis.

Because currently, it seems that it was just a chat interface from the audio clip.

It didn't seem as if there was any actual human to robot integration via systems like whisper or any kind of audio transcription software.

It just seemed as if someone typed it in.

And then the robot completed the task based on that, so that is what I would like to see in addition to this.

Because I think that that would improve this robot in terms of the usability.

And of course, another thing that I would like to see is this robot potentially moving around in the environment.

Because one thing that robots do struggle with is being in different environments.

And when the environment is reset, it becomes harder to identify objects and move objects to the correct location.

Those are two things that I think would, of course, be more impressive.

But I'm not trying to critique this robot at all.

I've got to say that, surprisingly, surprisingly, surprisingly, the leading lab currently in robotics from what we see here.

And yes, I always know that some people are going to be 100 skeptical because currently there is a lot of hype for robotics and humanoids.

When people see this stuff, they might think that it's tele-operated.

Although it says no tele-operation, I think that we can certainly say that this might be the leading lab now.

Whilst this might be the leading lab in terms of demos, we do know that Bottom Dynamics robot did a really, really impressive feat where they showcased how their new robot is going to move.

And I'm wondering if their robot is going to be far superior to this one in terms of the dexterity, the degrees of freedom, the things it's able to do in terms of the running and completing other tasks.

This shows us now that China is not playing games when it comes to humanoid robotics and the robotics industry.

And if you haven't checked out my previous video, there was another video where I showcased a completely different AI system that just bested GPT-4 and is now a state-of-the-art system that completes the requirements for being the best AI system.

Whilst many people said they're not going to believe it until they test it, I think we do have to give credit where credit is due.

Because this is clearly an area where China is investing a lot more than the US in terms of the infrastructure and in terms of the long-term planning.

I honestly can't wait for this company to showcase more things.

Of course, this could be completely fake.

We honestly have no idea.

But I really don't believe so, considering the amount of breakthroughs and impressive demos that we've completely seen.

With this one-time speed, no teleoperation robot doing incredible things, I think we're about to see another level in terms of competition.

Because companies and individuals are starting to realize the sheer implications of what this means.

And honestly, when I saw this demo, one thing that I did actually think about that was in the back of my mind was I was thinking that, Wow, we are going to move so quickly towards robotics that maybe, just maybe, robotics are going to be integrated into society in much more ways than I initially imagined.

Because I only imagined them doing certain things.

But if a robot can actually generalize with an AGI level system combined with all current AI systems and manages to prove inefficiency and fluidity and the dynamic movement, then we really could have robots in a variety of different scenarios.

With the Astrobot S1, let me know what you guys think about this.

Because I think that this is truly a state-of-the-art system.

And I think this, like I said before, is going to increase the level of competition from other companies.

And another thing on their website, they didn't have too much details on there.

But they did say that this robot is expected to be commercialized in 2024, meaning that they're probably going to be going to market this year.

And that means that we're likely to see this fully autonomous robot completing tasks later this year.

If that does happen, that would be pretty crazy.

I honestly expect 2025, because from what I've seen from robotics companies, there's usually delays and there's usually things that happen on the back end that do slow them down.

But to be honest, from what I've seen here, they do seem to be further along than anybody else.

With that being said, let me know what you think about humanoid robotics.

And I'll leave responses to your comments in the comment section below.