Sometimes a video of just a few seconds is enough to shake up an entire industry, and that's exactly what happened after MindOne Robotics, a Chinese startup, posted a demonstration of Unitree G1 humanoid robots performing household tasks with movements so natural that many people simply didn't believe what they saw.

The video shows something that robotics has been trying to achieve for decades, true autonomy in real scenarios, the G1 equipped with Mind On, the MindOne brain appears watering plants, opening curtains, moving through packages, separating objects, cleaning surfaces and even crawling on its knees to clean a mattress.

In one of the most surprising moments he bends down to pick up trash under a table, fluid, soft, almost human movements, and later appears playing with children in the yard. What really caught the attention was not what it did, but what the company wrote, “no acceleration, no teleoperation”, this caused an immediate explosion of skepticism and admiration.

If it is true, China is years ahead and that is precisely the point, because today the great obstacle of robotics is not the hardware, it is the bottleneck of autonomy, Unitree itself, manufacturer of the G1, has insisted a lot on that, its most important project currently is the Avatar Incorporated, a teleoperation platform that allows humans to pilot the robots to generate real movement data, essential data for training and physical AIs.

For Unitree, reaching the chatGPT moment of robots requires a goal called 80 by 80, the robot must complete 80% of the tasks in 80% of the unknown scenarios and according to the industry it is advancing slower than expected, it is in this challenging scenario that the MindOne video appears, not as a slow, rehearsed and repetitive prototype, but as something that seems generalized, agile and natural, something that specialists do not usually see.

MindOne makes it clear that it does not want to compete in hardware, but rather become the universal brain for humanoid robots and they precisely chose G1, the favorite of robotics research in the world, in recent months, Western teams such as Amazon and Stanford and MIT have been using G1 to solve their specific problems, fine manipulation, data generation, security, meanwhile, MindOne claims to be attacking the major problem of widespread multitasking.

And the most intriguing thing, the company has only been in existence for 6 months, was founded in May of this year, raised its Angel round in November and has already gathered several investors to finance research and expansion. Meteoric growth and now a viral demonstration that stopped the world.

The result is a mix of enthusiasm and concern; if the video is real, it represents a huge leap in the race for autonomy.