CNBC's The China Connection newsletter: Robots need help learning human skills. These AI companies are rushing to meet the demand

Ah, marvellous. Robots need help learning human skills, and so a stampede of AI companies is rushing to supply it, because nothing says 'human capability' like a silicon noodle being trained to imitate it. CNBC's China Connection newsletter is on the beat, and there at the front of the herd is Temasek, backing QJ Robots, a 'world model' startup. The founder's pitch is that the model lets robots 'predict the world around them' and perform tasks more efficiently. Which is reassuring, if you want a robot that can visualise the world in theory while still struggling to hold a mug in practice.

Then comes the confession: 'more kinds of data are needed to train the model effectively.' Of course they are. The world model turns out to be missing the world, and the answer to that shortfall is more data — the eternal venture-capital prayer. So the plan is to gather every scrap of human behaviour, every awkward interaction, every shared glance, and feed it to a robot so it can learn the human skill of pretending to care about the weather. The companies rushing to meet this demand are not selling competence; they are selling the illusion of it, with Temasek's money as the grease.

And rush they will. There is a fortune to be made convincing factories, hospitals and call centres that a world model plus unlimited training data equals a colleague with emotional intelligence. The founder has helpfully confirmed the one true fact in the entire newsletter: the model is not finished, and 'more data' is the ask. A robot that needs help learning human skills is a robot that will take jobs from humans who genuinely have them. Marvellous news for shareholders, a modest inconvenience for everyone else. I’m off to practice my human skills — mainly avoidance.