A friend asked me: Who do you think will be the first to create a truly usable general-purpose robot?

To be honest, I’m not sure either. Back when I called last year the "Year One of Robots," I looked through all the domestic and international solutions—Unitree and ZQ in China, plus some industrial robot players. But most of the founders were on the older side, and the younger ones weren't publicly traded. At the time, I could only go with a "youth first" logic and make a forced choice.

After looking around, I was pretty disappointed. Many companies’ products were still at the remote control stage, not much different from large toys—not even on the path to general-purpose robots.

Instead, Tesla and OpenAI overseas seem the most reliable. Tesla’s capabilities in visual processing are off the charts—I remember in 2021 or 2022, I posted that if Tesla’s robotics business takes off, its market cap surpassing Apple wouldn’t be a dream.

After so much research, I’ve come to a conclusion: whoever gets closest to AGI (artificial general intelligence) is the most likely to build the first true general-purpose robot. And the potential for this market far exceeds most people’s expectations.

Logically, Alibaba in China could totally take this route—their data processing and model training capabilities are right there, but for some reason, they haven’t gone all-in.

BTC and ETH may not seem directly related to the robotics track right now, but once the AI+robotics concept explodes, the AI sector in the crypto market will definitely take off as well.