China’s military aims to harness the coming ‘ChatGPT for robotics’

This week, more than 12,000 human runners raced 21 robots through the streets of Beijing in what was billed as the “first showdown between humanoid robots and brave human participants.” Humanity won this round, with the top human, a racer from Ethiopia, taking first place in the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon with a time of 1:02:36. Yet the fastest humanoid robot, the Tiangong Ultra, did complete the 13-mile run at a respectable 2:40 clip, pointing to a future where human-like machines may not just match, but soon race ahead of humans. 

That same future may lie not too far away in warfare as well, if the recent efforts of the Chinese defense industrial complex prove successful. 

A world of human-like robots has long been a staple of science fiction, extending from their first mention in Karel Čapek’s play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), to the Terminator movies, and beyond. Like so much in technology now, this myth is rapidly approaching reality, as scientists and CEOs are beginning to see the hardware of robots as the natural destination of AI software, allowing machine intelligence to interact and learn from the real world, not just data sets.

Read more at Defense One