Entrepreneurs
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许华哲
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166: 许华哲 Returns to Embodied-AI Entrepreneurship: He Doesn’t Want to Miss the Biggest Watermelon
许华哲 believes scientist-founded companies have gone mainstream, and that technological conviction and long-term vision matter most in the AI…
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- 许华哲 believes scientist-founded companies have gone mainstream, and that technological conviction and long-term vision matter most in the AI era. Citing Ilya, Hassabis, Hinton, LeCun, OpenAI and DeepMind, he argues that the judgments that truly change the world often come from staying committed to long-term goals; but 破壳 is not trying to become a large company’s research arm—it wants to build an independent, consumer-facing robotics brand for the long haul.
- 破壳 wants to define the home-robot category. Apple represents defining a new category; Xiaomi represents involving users and finding the broadest common ground. The first phase will involve its own hardware, AI model and product definition, likely starting with a wheeled dual-arm robot, with a legged platform potentially developed in parallel, targeting roughly 2 hours of battery life and homes worldwide.
- His AI-native approach rejects solving traditional robotics one task at a time, closing the data loop in constrained environments, and assembling small models. AI is fundamentally an inductive engine; data type and diversity matter more than homogeneous volume collected in a closed environment. 破壳 wants a unified model, scaled post-training and reinforcement learning to let robots explore, evaluate and use data while preserving multi-task generalization.
- Early products will control risk by drawing clear boundaries. Wheeled robots cannot truly climb stairs, while weight, batteries, carrying loads, docking and overseas deployment remain unresolved. The first generation will not provide services involving direct contact with human bodies; high-risk tasks such as feeding, holding babies, turning people over and massage will come much later.
- 许华哲 believes in ecosystems, concentrating resources on AI and product rather than building every component in-house. Based on the current data volume, model pretraining and post-training could require RMB100M–RMB200M a year; as the data scales, the budget could approach that of a large model. He hopes real home robots will already be in users’ homes roughly 2 years from now, around early 2028.
- China has not missed the window for general intelligence, he says, but the industry must not let near-term shipments and demonstrations dictate its direction. He warns against selling data to US competitors, blindly mass-producing robots without disclosing daily active usage, and endlessly optimizing dance routines. He is watching PI, Generalist, Sunday and Figure most closely on intelligence, and roughly estimates that fully human-level general intelligence may still be about 5 years away.
- Robots are not a hobby for him but a form of love and a mission. He chose robotics because it is harder and potentially more consequential than game AI; the odds of startup success may be very low, but as long as he gives everything he has, creates something valuable and uses technology to help more people, he is willing to pay “all the costs” (所有的代价).