EngineAi is a robotics company based in Shenzhen, China, founded in 2023. Shenzhen is rapidly emerging as China’s own Silicon Valley—but without the billionaire vulture capitalists in charge. The company is led by Zhao Tongyang, who is still in his mid-30s. Tongyang is a veteran robotics expert and was recently responsible for robotic development on Xpeng’s Iron humanoid robot.

In just two years, EngineAi has developed an advanced humanoid robot, the T800, which demonstrates lightning-fast movements indistinguishable from those of humans. The T800 has gone viral on nearly every platform, showcasing impressive acrobatic skills in Kung Fu.

I had thought this level of robotics was at least 50–100 years away, but the pace of development coming out of China has caught Western civilisation off guard. The T800 is already shaping the future and racing toward a new era of robotics.

China is rapidly solving the technological challenges required to develop humanoid robots with mobility comparable to humans. However, as impressive and groundbreaking as the T800 appears, true human-like dexterity is not measured by extreme acrobatic manoeuvres.

The real test for the current state of humanoid robots is whether they can perform simple, everyday tasks with human-level dexterity—like folding a towel. The answer, at present, is a firm no. Achieving such fine manipulation requires immense processing power and vast machine-learning datasets, demanding enormous data centers to process the information necessary for a robot to fold a towel.

For now, China has solved the mechanical mobility challenge for humanoid robots, leaving the rest of the world behind. The next frontier is teaching these robots to handle delicate tasks with human-like precision—folding that towel—and once that is achieved, we will truly be entering uncharted territory.