Earlier this year in Beijing, a humanoid robot crossed a half-marathon finish line in a blistering 50 minutes, 26 seconds. The feat immediately lit up global headlines for shattering the human world record by almost seven minutes.

This performance came with many asterisks. The robot followed a pre-mapped track, stayed in its own dedicated lane, and had a human support crew trailing behind it in case something broke.

But the performance gap didn’t just close, it evaporated – down from over 2.5 hours in 2025. This wasn’t just about better motors or lighter carbon fibre; it reflected a massive shift in what a robot actually is. And that transformation has implications for our homes and hospitals too.

Tricked into going rogue

For decades, robotics was all about rigid, predictable coding. You wrote a program, locked the machine in a metal cage and let it execute repetitive tasks forever.

Industrial safety standards were built on the premise that if you can map the physical path of a robotic arm, for example, you can bound its risk with a cage or laser tripwire.

But the systems moving into hospitals and homes today don’t use fixed code blocks. They run on “foundation models” – the same kind of internet-trained artificial intelligence that powers chatbots like ChatGPT.

If you tell a modern AI-driven robot to “clean up a spill in the kitchen”, it uses these models to interpret your unique room (rather than match it to a pre-programmed list), figure out your........

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