For Chinese companies, the bet is that lower prices and more AI features will convince people to wear clever glasses all day and record their lives with continuous video and audio. If you lower the price to about $200, “people will start using them every day,” says Brian Chen, CEO of the Appotronics innovation center. Such a change would raise obvious privacy and security concerns, which both Rokid and Appotronics acknowledged, but they believe the potential benefit is worth the risk.
From vacuum cleaners to cars
Several immense Chinese electric vehicle makers, including Geely and Great Wall Motor, showed off their cars at CES, but two brands that almost no one had heard of before stole the show. Both Nebula Next and Kosmera have unveiled prototypes of sleek, luxury electric sports cars, neither of which are yet commercially available. Both brands have ties to Dreame, a leading Chinese company that makes robotic vacuum cleaners, but say they operate independently of it. However, at CES, the Nebula Next and Kosmera booths were associated with Dreame in the conference catalog.
These complicated corporate relationships aside, the idea of a robotic vacuum cleaner company investing in electric vehicles is not as absurd as it seems. In any case, this is the latest example of Chinese electronics companies using their manufacturing expertise to produce cars. The founder of Roborock, another Chinese vacuum device company, launched an electric vehicle company in 2023. Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone and home appliance giant, launched its first electric vehicle in 2024.
Dreame is not the first and will not be the last Chinese company to switch from electronics to electric vehicles, says Lei Xing, an independent auto market analyst and former editor-in-chief of China Auto Review, who looked at Kosmera prototypes with me at CES. China’s sophisticated supply chain, engineering talent and manufacturing ecosystem make it relatively uncomplicated for novices to try building cars, Xing explains, but only a few will succeed. Others could end up more like Apple, whose long-term car project ultimately collapsed. “Life and death will be natural,” says Xing.
The Robovans are coming
When I returned to China last year, I made sure to try Baidu’s robotaxi service, which is roughly on par with Alphabet’s Waymo in the US. However, what surprised me in China was how many autonomous delivery vehicles roamed the same open streets alongside my robotaxi.
Neolix is a leading company in China producing both hardware and software for robovans. He says the number of such vehicles deployed in China is growing roughly tenfold each year, reaching about 10,000 in 2025. (By comparison, there are about 2,500 Waymo cars in the U.S.). Neolix claims to represent more than 60 percent of the market and has no major competitors globally, says Zhao You, the company’s executive chairman. Neolix presented three of its cars at CES, ranging in size from a tiny refrigerator to a golf cart: small boxes without windows, placed on huge wheels, with no driver inside.
Neolix is keen to expand internationally and is already implementing pilot projects in the Middle East, East Asia and Latin America. It is also looking at the US market. Zhao told me he realizes that any autonomous vehicle company in the U.S. will face intense scrutiny on issues such as security and data protection, but he hopes to work with local partners who could aid with compliance requirements in the country. “For a technology company, working with a single cloud provider for any market is the cheapest option, but it won’t work. You need to talk to your local regulators and find out what cloud providers they accept,” Zhao says.
Generating viral videos
When OpenAI released Sora 2 last year, it made the ambitious bet that generative AI could be not just a tool, but a content genre immense enough to sustain an entire social media platform. This vision hasn’t been fully realized yet, but at CES I met with two AI video companies that compete with OpenAI’s Sora.
Kling is the AI division of Kuaishou, a hugely popular Chinese compact video creation platform. Combined, the Kling app and website have more than 60 million registered users, most of whom the company says are based outside China. About 100 people attended Kling’s panel event at CES with advanced users of the platform. Jason Zada, the award-winning director who helmed Coca-Cola’s controversial AI-generated 2024 holiday ad, said he recently used Kling to generate YouTube video depicts a fireplace peacefully burning while Santa Claus, turkeys, astronauts, and snowmen inexplicably appear. Zada said he created more than 600 clips with Kling and pieced them together into the final 105-minute film. It cost about $2,500 in tokens.