Don Weinland

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359 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 28 Aug

Don Weinland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Bots on the ground: China leads humanoid race · 28 Aug 2026 podcast

There's another side of this, which is the cost.

And it's very, very expensive to run these centers.

So, first of all, for humanoid, you can cost up to $15,000 a piece.

Then you need this training process.

This costs anywhere from 500 to 700 UN per hour.

So when you start thinking about the need to get a hundred million hours of training.

Data for a useful robot to finally come into existence, you're really looking at incredible costs.

So I mentioned egocentric data, getting people to put on headsets and gloves and pretend like they're working or doing real work and recording their movements.

This is also taking place at a pretty wide scale in China right now.

This e-commerce company called jd.com said that it's recruiting a hundred thousand of its own staff and 500,000 people outside of its company to

Put on this type of gear and record their movements.

So you can see that there are companies in China that are really interested in finding other ways of collecting data.

If JD is successful in this operation over the next two years, it may be able to collect 10 million hours of real-world data.

So that would be quite an achievement.

This is one of the key questions about the humanoid robotics industry in China.

A lot of these will go to these training centers.

In fact, the training centers are a key source of demand for the robots.

But think about this: this is an industry that is creating robots that can't do a whole lot.

And the only reason why they are being bought and sold is because.

Because there's a promise of better robots in the future.

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