Chinese work ethic driven by overproduction of STEM majors leading to 25% youth unemployment...also they probably stole a lot of the fundamental stuff that was super hard to produce but easy to copy and build on top of.

On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.

Their earlier robots (A1, Go 1) have a lot of lineage from Ben Kats' (from MIT) Mini Cheetah project, even down to the shape of the communication protocols used for motor control. I've not had the chance to closely inspect their newer robots, so I can't tell you what's their secret sauce, but I suspect it has as much to do with RL-based control and software as it does with hardware improvements.

I often hear about "muh china stealing", two questions come to mind:

1. how could they steal something that western companies dont even have yet?

2. for more fundamental stuff, western companies did transfer knowledge themselves by moving factories to China, in exchange for decades of access to China market and exorbitant profits they earned. Where exactly is "supposed stealing" in unitree ?