My latest at Forbes: Last year’s Beijing Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon winner stumbled across the line in 2 hours and 40 minutes, well behind any human. This year, a Chinese smartphone maker’s robot ran the 21km course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That beats the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds.
One year. That’s how long it took to go from 2.4x slower than a human to faster than the fastest human on the planet over 13 miles.
The event also scaled dramatically, from 20 teams in 2025 to 100 teams fielding 300 robots in 2026. And where last year every robot was remote-controlled, this year 40% ran fully autonomously. These aren’t incremental improvements. This is the kind of trajectory that should get the attention of everyone thinking about the future of work, manufacturing and the global economy.
The robots are getting good, fast.