AI Tech / news
China's Embodied AI Founders Turn to Incense and Altars as Funding Tightens
Founders of Chinese embodied AI startups are reportedly burning incense and kowtowing at altars for good luck as the sector's hype cools and investor cash dries up. The rituals mark a surreal collision of hustle culture and old superstition in one of tech's most pressured niches.
Accounts circulating on Chinese platforms including 36kr and Zhihu describe founders of embodied AI companies — makers of robots designed to physically interact with the real world — adopting decidedly unscientific methods as their ventures stall. Incense is lit, altars are assembled and foreheads meet the floor in appeals for fortune.
The backdrop is a gold rush that has been running at extreme speed. Embodied AI was billed as the next major frontier for the sector, drawing intense attention and expectation from investors and the public alike.
As signs of cooling emerge in the broader AI bubble and funding becomes harder to secure, the distance between science-fiction promises and what today's machines can actually do has widened, according to the reports. Founders face mounting pressure to deliver breakthroughs on schedules the technology may not support.
The turn to ritual is being read as a marker of anxiety inside an industry confronting an uncertain economic reality. For a young, digitally native workforce steeped in relentless hustle culture, the spectacle of high-tech entrepreneurs seeking divine intervention lands as an unusually candid admission of the limits of pure logic.
The phenomenon has circulated widely online as a darkly comic subplot in China's AI story, one in which ancient spiritual practice sits alongside cutting-edge robotics.