CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is the world’s biggest tech show, where firms launch recent gadgets and announce recent developments, and it happens every January. This yr, it attracted over 148,000 attendees and over 4,100 exhibitors. It sprawls across the Las Vegas Convention Center, town’s biggest exhibition space, and spills over into adjoining hotels.
China has long had a presence at CES, but this yr it showed up in a giant way. Chinese exhibitors accounted for nearly 1 / 4 of all firms on the show, and in pockets like AI hardware and robotics, China’s presence felt especially dominant. On the ground, I saw tons of Chinese industry attendees roaming around, plus a notable variety of Chinese VCs. Multiple experienced CES attendees told me that is the primary post-covid CES where China was present in a way you couldn’t miss. Last yr might need been trending that way too, but quite a lot of Chinese attendees reportedly bumped into visa denials. Now AI has change into the universal excuse, and reason, to make the trip.
As expected, AI was the largest theme this yr, seen on every booth wall. It’s each the largest thing everyone seems to be talking about and a deeply confusing marketing gimmick. “We added AI” is slapped onto every little thing from the reasonable (PCs, phones, TVs, security systems) to the deranged (slippers, hair dryers, bed frames).
Consumer AI gadgets still feel early and of very uneven quality. Probably the most common categories are educational devices and emotional support toys—which, as I’ve written about recently, are all the fashion in China. There are some memorable ones: Luka AI makes a robotic panda that scuttles around and keeps a watchful eye in your baby. Fuzozo, a fluffy keychain-size AI robot, is essentially a digital pet in physical form. It comes with a built-in personality and reacts to the way you treat it. The businesses selling these just hope you won’t think too hard in regards to the privacy implications.
Ian Goh, an investor at 01.VC, told me China’s manufacturing advantage gives it a singular edge in AI consumer electronics, because quite a lot of Western firms feel they simply cannot fight and win in the sector of hardware.
One other area where Chinese firms appear to be at the pinnacle of the pack is household electronics. The products they make have gotten impressively sophisticated. Home robots, 360 cams, security systems, drones, lawn-mowing machines, pool heat pumps … Did you realize two Chinese brands mainly dominate the marketplace for home cleansing robots within the US and are eating the lunch of Dyson and Shark? Did you realize just about all the suburban yard tech you may buy within the West comes from Shenzhen, regardless that that whole backyard-obsessed lifestyle barely exists in China? These things is so sleek that you just wouldn’t clock it as Chinese unless you went looking. The old “low-cost and repetitive” stereotype doesn’t explain what I saw. I walked away from CES feeling that I needed a serious home appliance upgrade.
After all, appliances are a secure, mature market. On the more experiential front, humanoid robots were an enormous magnet for crowds, and Chinese firms placed on an ideal show. Every robot gave the impression to be dancing, in styles from Michael Jackson to K-pop to lion dancing, some even doing back flips. Hangzhou-based Unitree even arrange a boxing ring where people could “challenge” its robots. The robot fighters were about half the dimensions of an adult human and the matches often led to a robot knockout, but that’s not likely the purpose. What Unitree was actually showing off was its robots’ stability and balance: they got shoved, stumbled across the ring, and stayed upright, recovering mid-motion. Beyond flexing dynamic movements like these there have been also impressive showcases of dexterity: Robots might be seen folding paper pinwheels, doing laundry, playing piano, and even making latte art.
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Nevertheless, most of those robots, even the nice ones, are one-trick ponies. They’re optimized for a particular task on the show floor. I attempted to make one fold a T-shirt after I’d flipped the garment around, and it got confused in a short time.
