China’s humanoid robot half marathon showed real gains in speed and autonomy, even if the race still revealed clear technical limits.

BEIJING — It was not even close as a bright red Chinese humanoid named “Lightning” lived up to its name in a half-marathon pitting humans against robots, smoking its competition on Sunday

The feat occurred at an even in Beijing that pitted robots against human runners. The humanoid robotics market is on the rise and could reach 1 billion machines by 2050. A 5′ 5″ bipedal robot named Lightning just crushed the human world record time for running a half marathon,

A robot in China outran the human half-marathon record, though tumbles and chaos stole part of the spotlight.