Greater Bay Area conference spotlights embodied AI and robotics

While conferences are easy to overlook, this Greater Bay Area meeting is a good snapshot of what China’s academic ecosystem is prioritizing: embodied intelligence, general‑purpose robots, and tight integration between large models and physical systems. The fact that multiple academicians and leading labs are framing “general robots” as a major research program suggests that the embodied‑AGI narrative—intelligence that can act in the world, not just on text—is going mainstream in Chinese planning. ([chinanews.com.cn](https://www.chinanews.com.cn/dwq/2026/02-07/10567960.shtml))

For the global race, that matters in two ways. First, it indicates that China is not content to focus only on chatbots and cloud APIs; it wants to own the stack from perception to control in real‑world environments. Second, these conferences double as talent‑allocation devices: graduate students, grant‑makers and municipal governments take cues from the themes that get highlighted. When a city like Shenzhen—already a hardware powerhouse—brands embodied AI and robotics as core strategic directions, you can expect more labs, startups, and subsidies to follow.

If even a fraction of these efforts translate into robust open‑source platforms or widely deployed robots, they could accelerate feedback loops between simulation, real‑world data, and model architectures. That’s the sort of loop many AGI theorists believe is necessary to move beyond purely text‑trained systems toward more general, grounded intelligence.