Chinese firm's new AI model enables self-learning robots in major tech breakthrough

China's robotics industry saw another a major breakthrough on Monday with the launch of the AgiBot GO-1, the first-ever universal embodied artificial intelligence (AI) large model which enables robots to learn new skills by simply observing actions or watching videos, much like humans do.

The latest achievement comes amid an unprecedented period of growth in China's tech sector, with agile humanoid robots becoming increasingly capable of a wide range of application scenarios, while the country's AI industry has also been energized by the emergence of a new cost-effective model released by Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which has made global waves since its release earlier this year.

The groundbreaking model from the Shanghai-based robotics company AgiBot uses an innovative architecture enabling smart robots to learn and understand human actions with just a limited set of data. It looks to harness the advantages of "embodied AI", which refers to AI that is integrated into physical systems, which in this case enables a robot to fully interact with its surroundings.

By analyzing online videos or observing real-life demonstrations, the robot is able to replicate what it sees and apply this newfound knowledge to carry out new tasks or respond to new environments.

"For a new scenario or task, we only need a few hundred pieces of data to achieve the desired results. The data can be collected in just a single day. In the past, it typically needed tens of thousands of pieces of data," said Yao Maoqing, president of AgiBot's Embodied Intelligence Business Unit.

The GO-1 model offers continuous evolution, which means when faced with new challenges in real-world applications, the robot can autonomously understand a situation and optimize solutions based on its knowledge, without the need to start learning from scratch.

The model also features an impressive ability to share new information across its entire network, essentially meaning that once one robot acquires a set of skills, other related robots can quickly adopt the same capabilities.

"We can use various types of data, including data from one robot, other robots, and even human operation data. By using generative models, the system learns a unified motion representation. For a specific robot, we can then decode this unified representation into joint control commands using another module," explained Yao.

The release of the GO-1 marks another significant leap toward for embodied AI and for AgiBot, who already celebrated the production of its 1,000th universal embodiment robot back in January. The firm says they now expect to deliver thousands more units this year as interest around their product line grows.

Chinese firm's new AI model enables self-learning robots in major tech breakthrough

A Canadian historian has shed light on how the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre were largely forgotten in North America, making it susceptible for distortion and denial of crucial facts.

In an interview with China Media Group (CMG), David Wright, an associate professor at the Department of History in the University of Calgary's Faculty of Arts, emphasized that the truth of the massacre in Nanjing is beyond dispute, yet several generations later, the West has not adequately preserved the memories of this history.

"My mother's and father's generation, they were alive when the Rape of Nanking happened. They were horrified to listen to reports on radios. And especially after the war was over, when the Tokyo war crime trials began, a lot more detail about the Rape of Nanking came out. In North America, the wartime generation remembered it and remembered it well. But then the next generation, my generation, baby boomers, that abhorrence was not passed on to us adequately well," Wright said.

The notorious Nanjing Massacre by Japanese troops led to over 300,000 deaths in 1937. According to the historian, the accuracy of this figure is supported by a robust body of evidence, but Japan's right-wing forces have nonetheless attempted to deny the number of victims as well as the severity of the crimes. Often, these claims rely on the absence of physical remains of the victims.

"They're dumped into the river. They're burned, a lot of them. You cannot find the remains. So they think they can find one or two errors you've made about photographs and from that conclude that the entire Rape of Nanking never happened. It's just nonsense. There is abundant evidence that something very, very terrible did happen in Nanjing," Wright said.

"And the people who deny it, I mean, historically they are nihilists. For them, history is all about image, not about fact. And if that thing really did happen in Nanjing, that's an inconvenient fact and they want to try to erase it by denying it," he added.

The Nanjing Massacre occurred after Japanese troops captured the then-Chinese capital on Dec. 13, 1937. Over six weeks, they killed approximately 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers in one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.

Truth of Nanjing Massacre allows no distortion: Canadian historian