The Ant Group’s humanoid robot serves shrimp as it enters the global race to build AI-powered robots.
The Ant Group’s humanoid robot serves shrimp as it enters the global race to build AI-powered robots.
Chinese tech behemoth Ant Group, which owns payment platform Alipay, has been showing off its first humanoid robot at tech conferences this month. It joins a growing wave of companies carving out space along a fresh frontier in automation by combining artificial intelligence with physical tech.
Videos and news reports show Robbyant’s R1 robot cooking for audiences at the IFA 2025 tech show in Berlin last week. What was on the menu? Shrimp, reportedly. The company, an arm of Jack Ma-backed Ant Group, has also been parading the human-shaped bot at the 2025 Inclusion Conference this week in Shanghai, according to Bloomberg.
Helping out in the kitchen is the first of many potential use cases for R1, Robbyant says. The company, also known as Shanghai Ant Lingbo Technology Co., says the bot could be used as a companion or caregiver robot in healthcare, or as a robotic tour guide in the travel industry.
The company has not announced a launch date or price point for the bot and is reportedly testing it in community centers and restaurants. It would be wise to view claims of R1’s performance skeptically until the bot can be seen acting on its own in the real world, though this video from IFA doesn’t set expectations too high, as R1 places a box on a counter at a pace so glacial it makes a sloth seem speedy:
Ant joins the likes of Elon Musk’s Tesla in doubling down on AI-powered robotics. While the field has been plagued with hyped-up promises and underwhelmingly slow progress on even basic tasks for decades, many believe that software advances will finally help the field overcome decades of slow and deeply underwhelming progress.
