@heyshrutimishra: Baidu invited me to their office in Beijing this week. I expected presentations and product demos. What I didn’t expect…

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Summary

Baidu invited a visitor to their Beijing office to demo a robot hand that mimics human hand movements with minimal delay, highlighting the rapid growth of China's humanoid robotics ecosystem with over 150 companies, as noted by Elon Musk.

Baidu invited me to their office in Beijing this week. I expected presentations and product demos. What I didn’t expect was to walk in and immediately start playing with the future. There was this robot hand just sitting there. Matte black, five fingers, human-sized & next to it, a webcam pointing at a little open space on the table. Someone said, just put your hand in front of it and move. So I did. And the robot copied me. Every single finger. The delay was so small it felt like looking in a mirror. Here’s what’s fascinating about what I saw. The whole playbook in China right now is hardware companies building the bodies, AI companies building the intelligence, and everyone snapping together like Lego. Everyone’s doing one thing really well. And this ecosystem is moving at a speed that’s genuinely hard to comprehend. China now has over 150 robotics companies building humanoid robots. The US has around 20. Even Elon Musk acknowledged it at Davos. “China is very good at AI, very good at manufacturing, and will definitely be the toughest competition for Tesla. To the best of our knowledge, we don’t see any significant competitors outside of China.” The hand I played with? It’s just one small piece of something much, much bigger.
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Cached at: 05/16/26, 05:22 PM

Baidu invited me to their office in Beijing this week. I expected presentations and product demos. What I didn’t expect was to walk in and immediately start playing with the future.

There was this robot hand just sitting there. Matte black, five fingers, human-sized & next to it, a webcam pointing at a little open space on the table.

Someone said, just put your hand in front of it and move.

So I did. And the robot copied me. Every single finger. The delay was so small it felt like looking in a mirror.

Here’s what’s fascinating about what I saw.

The whole playbook in China right now is hardware companies building the bodies, AI companies building the intelligence, and everyone snapping together like Lego.

Everyone’s doing one thing really well. And this ecosystem is moving at a speed that’s genuinely hard to comprehend. China now has over 150 robotics companies building humanoid robots. The US has around 20.

Even Elon Musk acknowledged it at Davos. “China is very good at AI, very good at manufacturing, and will definitely be the toughest competition for Tesla. To the best of our knowledge, we don’t see any significant competitors outside of China.”

The hand I played with? It’s just one small piece of something much, much bigger.

Boarded my first bullet train in China today.

The train is doing 350 km/h … about 220 mph. From inside, you can’t feel it. The coffee on the tray doesn’t move & landscape outside is just gone.

Last October, two of these trains passed each other on a test line at a combined speed of 896 km/h. That’s faster than most commercial airliners cruise at.

In 2024 alone, China built over 3,100 km of new railway. Its high-speed network is now nearly double the rest of the world’s combined. Currently I m mind blown by the speed at which China is growing

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