One delegate, speaking at Bank of America’s inaugural Asia Pacific Breakthrough Technology Dialogue in Singapore told the assembled industry leaders, investors and academics that the DeepSeek moment for robotics would be coming very soon, possibly by the end of 2025.
Technology moves quickly. But true breakthroughs tend to be defined by the moment when they enter mass consciousness.
In January 2025, for example, the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 model created headlines across the world, with media commentators highlighting how the Chinese company appeared to have achieved the same performance as leading AI models at a fraction of the cost1,2.
For robotics or physical AI, a similar awakening may occur when humans start to see a much closer reflection of themselves in machines: flexible and intuitive rather than mechanical and repetitive.
The advent of these humanoids, as they are being termed, is being driven by the technical integration of foundational AI models (soſtware) into robots (hardware). This is enabling robots to use cognitive reasoning to interact with and learn from the environment around them for the first time.
The current wave of investments into robotics has a new name – embodied AI. As Dr. Maoqing Yao, executive VP of R&D and Embodied Intelligence, at Shanghai-headquartered robotics company AgiBot, explains: