As we predicted, the entire embodied intelligence industry will be out of control in 2025, and finally ushered in a general explosion at this year’s CCTV Spring Festival Gala. The 2026 Spring Festival Gala just witnessed the “highest mechanical intelligence” in history——From stage design to visual effects, to countlessAIand robots, this year’s Spring Festival Gala is a real technological Spring Festival Gala, with a higher technological content than any previous one.
For example, in the first language program "Grandma's Favorite", in addition to starring Cai Ming, Wang Tianfang and Doubao AI, there is also the Songyan Power Robot accompanied by the BGM of Journey to the West——
Surprisingly, the effect of adding the four Bumi robots of Songyan Dynamics to the language program was not bad, and even quite interesting.
▲ Picture | Songyan Power
Not only is the "crying cat meme" used by the smallest robot, as well as the iconic backflips, dances and holding objects with both hands, but the phrase "What a blessing, 220V" has the potential to become a new meme throughout 2026.
What's even better is that the "Two Cai Mings" at the end of the sketch are also, to some extent, a recall of "Robot Funny Talk" in the 1996 Spring Festival Gala 30 years ago.
Compared with the "humanoid robot Cai Ming" 30 years ago and the "embodied intelligence Cai Ming" 30 years later, which of our imaginations have become reality?
Another thing I have to mention is that, in addition to the novelty of the appearance of robots, for a Spring Festival Gala language program, "Grandma's Favorite" is handled quite naturally -
Of course, this is mainly because the copywriting this time did not forcefully shift to "traditional topics" such as marriage promotion, childbirth, and work gifts.
Coupled with the appearance of robots and a Hitchcockian twist, "Grandma's Favorite" successfully created a program that was not so "Spring Festival Gala".
After all, in addition to the improvement in copywriting level, the greatest improvement in Cai Ming’s and grandson’s level is actually:
▲ Picture | Weibo
Immediately following the skit is the martial arts program "Martial BOT" starring Yu Shu.
As the basic skill of humanoid robots in the past six months, martial arts performance is a piece of cake for most current humanoid products. What is more interesting is the technological progress in the past year.
Compared with the old version of H1 in "Yang BOT" in 2025, which could only be walked slowly while changing handkerchiefs, the new version of G1 in "Wu BOT" this year is a leap forward.
Not only is the surging joint power, the Yushu G1 performing martial arts is very powerful in terms of body balance, movement coherence, naturalness, and start-stop control. It deserves the highest praise:
Really human-like!
Moreover, "Wu BOT" not only has traditional (body) martial arts performances, but also integrates parkour, boxing, hip-hop and equipment performances (nunchucks and long sticks):
There are so many different styles, whether it is for the action programming in the background or the automatic balance sensor on the body,These are completely different challenges from Yangko dancing.
According to CCTV, Yushu "achieved three consecutive single-leg backflips for the first time" in "Wu BOT" and used a custom-made catapult to complete jumps and flips of up to 2-3 meters in the air.
Especially the specially arranged falls and carp fights in the middle of the show actually made the robot performance more "human":
At least for stunts, the effect of the new G1 is much better than the backflip of the previous Boston Dynamics Atlas——
▲ Picture | YouTube
Also taking the stage this year is the taller Yushu H2.
In addition to dancing swords with G1, he also completed a wave of Monkey King cosplay in the "World Yiwu Chinese Year". The accuracy of his dexterous hands is quite outstanding:
The Spring Festival Gala is not just the stage for Yushu and Songyan. The robots on stage this year also include magic atoms from the pursuit system.
In addition to the humanoid robot MagicBot Z1 acting as a backup dancer in the song "Building the Future Intelligently", you may not have noticed that the four-legged robot dogs, wheeled robot dogs andRobot Panda, in fact, they are all products of Magic Atom:
▲ Picture | Magic Atom
On the other hand, the sense of technology tonight does not only come from robots, domestic AI products are also deeply involved in the entire process of this Spring Festival Gala——
What I’m talking about here is not the occasional soft and hard advertisements, but an area that has received less attention in the past: stage design.
Perhaps you have also noticed that the stage art style of this year's Spring Festival Gala does not blindly pursue "red, purple, and colorful" like last year. Most dance and performance programs have their own main colors——
More importantly, this main color does not need to be the traditional "tomato scrambled eggs". We have seen a lot of visual designs based on dark colors, green, and silver, especially blue, which represents technology:
Just a more modern visual design can already be called progress for the Spring Festival Gala, not to mention that this year also introduced a new set of mechanisms that we did not expect:
ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model, which suddenly became popular two days before the holidays, has been used in the visual production of multiple programs. The Spring Festival Gala is actually the world’s first heavyweight customer of Seedance 2.0 to be publicly implemented.
In fact, including the opening dance "There Will Be a Miracle Soon", the dance "Ancient Rhythm of the Silk Road", the song "The Galloping Sea Horse", etc., Seedance participated in the generationBackground, screen and transition cuts.
Not to mention the opening of the sixth show "He Hua Shen", through the AI screen + real stage expansion method, the generated content of Seedance can be (almost) seamlessly cut into the real scenery, blurring the boundary between virtual and reality.
At least for a live broadcast environment with extremely low fault tolerance like the Spring Festival Gala, Seedance’s stable performance proves the breakthrough progress made in computing power and model architecture over the past year.
Looking back at this four-hour program, we can feel:
The role of technology in the Spring Festival Gala has been fundamentally improved.
On the stage in previous years, the role of robots was often a kind of "freshness" embellishment, appearing on the edge of the content in a slightly deliberate and clumsy manner.
But in 2026, whether it is Songyan Dynamics, Yushu Technology, Magic Atom, Galaxy Universal's "iron buddy", or Byte Vision AI's reorganization of stage logic,Technology has directly become the foundation of this Spring Festival Gala.
Standing on the threshold of 2026 in the lunar calendar, leaving aside the Spring Festival Gala, this is the starting point for embodied intelligence to participate in specific production and life.
Text | Ma Fuyao