CNBC's The China Connection newsletter: Robots need help learning human skills. These AI companies are rushing to meet the demand

The public and foreign visitors alike visit the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Aug. 21, 2026.Evelyn Cheng | CNBCHi, this is Evelyn, writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection — a snapshot of what I'm seeing and hearing from local businesses.Unitree's founder reminded everyone at the World Robot Conference last week that the biggest challenge for humanoids is learning human skills. AI helps, but is there a secret sauce?The big storyQJ Robots, a startup that's helping robots learn human skills, has been backed by Temasek, founder and CEO Haichuan Gao told me. The company's AI model focuses on helping robots predict the world around them and perform tasks more efficiently.QJ Robots claims it's already made more than 100 million yuan ($15 million) from deploying the model to more than 100,000 robots, mostly by companies in mainland China. That gives the startup a large base from which it collects data every month, Chief Technology Officer Tianren Zhang said. But it's not enough — he said more kinds of data are needed to train the model effectively. Zhang and CEO Gao both have PhDs in automation from Tsinghua University, where their three-ye...