Why Are Chinese Companies Rushing to Become the 'Chinese Version' Before US Peers Mature?

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Conclusion first: Chinese embodied AI companies should not aim to be the "Chinese version of XX," but rather build independent innovation paths based on their own scenarios and engineering capabilities. Top US companies are still far from maturity; imitation will only delay the team's true growth.

From Physical Intelligence's remarks at RSS 2026, a thought-provoking signal is that North America's most representative embodied AI company admits it is not yet mature. PI's founder explicitly stated, "Including Physical Intelligence, today's top North American embodied AI companies are still quite far from maturity." This confession sounds particularly jarring amidst the current trend in China's startup scene where companies casually call themselves the "Chinese Boston Dynamics" or the "Chinese PI."

Why "The Chinese Version of XX" is an Organizational Trap

Imitation strategies have historical rationality, especially during the internet era when "Copy to China" was an efficient path. But embodied AI differs fundamentally from software products: it involves deep coupling of hardware, control, perception, and interaction. Engineering efficiency relies heavily on the team's original understanding of the scenario, not reverse-engineering mature products.

From an organizational perspective, three issues deserve attention:

• Misaligned Strategic Anchors: When a team aims to become "the Chinese version of XX," they implicitly treat US companies' technical routes and product definitions as reference frames, rather than user needs or physical world laws. This suppresses the team's motivation to explore alternative solutions.
• Limited Team Growth: If engineers and researchers are guided long-term to reproduce others' results, they gradually lose the ability to pose original problems. Yet frontier problems in embodied AI require exactly this spirit of exploration from scratch.
• Disconnect Between Valuation and Reality: Capital markets favor the "Chinese version of XX" narrative, but this preference pressures companies to pursue benchmarking prematurely rather than solidly polishing engineering efficiency. Once the benchmark target itself is immature, the foundation of the entire narrative becomes unstable.

From an Engineering Efficiency Perspective, What is True Maturity?

PI's remarks reveal a key fact: US companies are still solving basic problems like "enabling robots to effectively complete complex tasks," such as generalization capability, robustness, cost, and mass production. These are not problems solvable by imitation, but require continuous iteration of engineering systems.

A noteworthy difference: China has unique advantages in hardware supply chains, scenario richness, and data collection scale. If teams focus their energy on "how to use domestic components to achieve a specific demo effect of PI," rather than "how to define new tasks in Chinese factory or home scenarios," they are actually wasting the organization's inherent asymmetric advantages.

Dimension	Benchmarking Mindset	Independent Path
Technical Route	Reproducing algorithms from papers	Designing systems based on scenario constraints
Team Composition	Emphasizing "overseas experience"	Emphasizing "understanding hardware + scenarios"
Iteration Rhythm	Demo releases as milestones	Success rate improvements in actual deployment as milestones
Risk Control	Fear of being different from the benchmark	Fear of violating physical world laws

Team Culture Building: Avoiding the "Chaser Mentality"

As a manager, I've observed many teams subconsciously accepting an assumption: US companies are ahead, so we just follow and learn. This assumption is increasingly dangerous in embodied AI because:

• No Prior Path: Most US companies are also trial-and-erroring themselves. For example, PI's different technical routes (e.g., language models directly controlling robots vs. modular hierarchical architectures) are still fiercely debated.
• Missing Key Windows: China has unique application scenarios (such as logistics warehousing, food service, home cleaning). The complexity of these scenarios differs from the US environment; copying US solutions may result in incompatibility.

The key to team growth lies in establishing internal technical aesthetics and judgment standards, rather than relying on external benchmarks. For instance, if a team spends time defining "what constitutes a good grasping strategy," rather than just reproducing the results of a certain paper, it is building independent innovation capability.

The "Good Era" and "Bad Choices" in Embodied AI

PI said this is "the best era for robotics," and I agree. Industry bubbles and capital heat bring more resources, but also lead many companies to make bad choices—choosing the easy-to-tell "Chinese version of XX" narrative instead of the difficult but truly valuable path of "defining oneself."

From an organizational perspective, a healthy team should focus its energy on answering "What unique problem do we solve for users?" rather than "How do we compare with Company XX?" The latter is the marketing department's job; the former is the soul of the engineering team.

Wrapping Up Directly

What Chinese companies need is not to become the next someone else, but to become the first version of themselves.

Original Link: https://www.qbitai.com/2026/07/460542.html