Taking on Silicon Valley head-on and going all out to challenge industry giants, what exactly is the "Dreame camp" aiming for?
At the start of 2026, Yu Hao posted on social media, stating verbatim that "The Dreame ecosystem will become the first hundred-trillion-dollar company ecosystem in human history."
Media outlets followed up for inquiries later, and Dreame responded that this is a "goal for the next two decades."
To be honest, once such remarks are put out, no matter how many attributives you add, the only thing readers will remember is the phrase "one hundred trillion".
At the Dreame Night event in the same month, he put forward the claims of reaching 200,000 employees in three years, an annual revenue of 1 trillion yuan, and his personal goal of "becoming the world's richest person at an early date". These remarks were later treated by the media as vision-oriented statements, and no one really took them as financial forecasts.
But this sets the tone for the entire year of the Dreame camp — Yu Hao is used to positioning Dreame in the same coordinate system as Apple, Tesla, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang. In April, he slammed Xiaohongshu for having "toxic values and profit models", and Dreame's legal department disclosed in May that it had sued 168 accounts and some platforms. In June, he was muted by multiple platforms including Weibo for "calling out and discrediting competitors", and the restriction was suspected to be lifted in early September.
Yu Hao's tactic of "writing the strongest competitors into press releases" was later fully copied by a person into the embodied intelligence track.
Who is Guo Renjie? Why does he dare to do that?
At the end of 2024, Guo Renjie, former Executive President of Dreame China, left his post and founded LeXiang in Suzhou.
Born in 1997, Guo Renjie studied in the Young Talent Program of Xi'an Jiaotong University and majored in finance at LSE. He joined Dreame in 2021 and was promoted all the way to Executive President of the China region.
According to his own statements and media reports, he grew the China region's business from scratch to a scale of 6 billion yuan.
He once said a very straightforward sentence at AWE: I joined Dreame just to learn from a Chinese company that aims to be the global No.1. After making it the No.1 in China, I started my own business.
The financing pace of LeXiang is a complete replica of the Dreame camp: two months after its establishment, it secured an angel round of nearly 200 million yuan, and accumulated nearly 500 million yuan through three rounds in 9 months. In July 2026, its nearly 500 million yuan Pre-A round was led by Ant Group, with a total accumulated financing of about 1 billion yuan. The R&D proportion exceeds 80%, and all team members graduated from Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and CMU.
A public statement that "involves" OpenAI
On September 10, 2026, LeXiang released an article titled Public Statement: OpenAI, Please Answer Three Questions, which directly named the article *An Alien Mind* published by Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist of OpenAI, on September 6.
The accusation logic of LeXiang is actually easy to understand, which can be summed up in eight words: Timeline comes first, content overlaps. They listed three layers of "systematic similarity", and attached their own timeline to each layer ——
The first layer is technical concepts. Words like self-evolution, brain-like structure, goal and value alignment can be used by anyone individually, but LeXiang claims that its Aether system launched at the end of July has packaged these concepts into a complete embodied intelligence framework. Then the article published by OpenAI on September 6 presented almost the exact same combination of concepts. LeXiang's framework came before OpenAI's article, which is the first layer of overlap.
The second layer is concept expression. Unconventional words such as "extraterrestrial visitor" and "alien mind" were publicly used by LeXiang during the technical exchange in Silicon Valley on August 16. As a result, the title of OpenAI's article is directly *An Alien Mind*, and the expression of "alien mind" also appears in the text. The probability that two independent teams come up with the same set of rare metaphors at the same time is extremely low.
The third layer is the most intuitive — particle special effects and interactive design on official websites. The official website of LeXiang Aether was launched in July, and OpenAI's new official website was revised on September 3, even the rhythm of the particle dynamic effects is similar. The fact that the official website of a Chinese startup highly resembles the new official website of the global AI benchmark is enough to raise questions.
LeXiang's plan is very clear: We have shown our cards in Silicon Valley long ago, and the content you released later highly overlaps with ours, so you have to give an explanation.
As of press time, OpenAI has not made any public response. CNBC reported that LeXiang is pushing forward the litigation, but no details of jurisdiction and cause of action are available. Whether it constitutes infringement has to be ruled by legal procedures, and this article does not draw a conclusion on behalf of the court.
But the public relations effect of this move has been achieved — A Chinese startup has dragged the global AI benchmark into the same conversation with a single statement.
If OpenAI does not respond, the public will keep asking; if it responds, it is equivalent to admitting that LeXiang is qualified to sit at the same table with it.
Even Dreame would call this operation "masterly".
Robots at the barbecue stall
Releasing a statement alone is not enough, it is necessary to prove that it is not a PPT-based company.
On September 16, LeXiang held a live stream at an outdoor barbecue stall in Shanghai, where robots "Er Ye" and "Wu Ye" received orders, grilled skewers, served dishes and poured water. Guo Renjie even lifted the curtain of the back kitchen to let the camera go inside, making it clear that no remote operation, no post-editing.
Media including Sina were present at the scene, and agreed that the credibility is indeed higher than that of pure videos.
But some people in the industry also whispered: the outdoor barbecue scenario is too simple. It is a real tough task when the robots really serve the elderly and children in ordinary families.
In terms of technical parameters, according to LeXiang's disclosure, Aether can realize cross-collaboration between Unitree G1 and Ubtech A3 with 200 hours of human videos, zero real machine data, and 4 billion parameters, and the first attempt success rate of some tasks exceeds 90%. These figures have not been verified by third parties.
What is inherited, and what is rewritten?
LeXiang did not simply refit a sweeping robot into a humanoid robot, but transplanted Dreame's consumer hardware logic and made several adjustments.
The inheritance is very clear: consumer-grade positioning comes first, Guo Renjie repeatedly mentioned "to make the DJI in the robotics industry", so that ordinary families can afford the products first; high-standard financing and high-standard team to exchange capital for time; order-driven, according to LeXiang, the number of pre-orders for M1 is nearly 20,000; global expectation management, the use of Pre-A funds is directly marked as "global channels".
There are also many rewrites: the technical base is changed from motors to joints and models, with self-developed small high-torque motors and VLA vision-language-action models; the scenario is changed from deterministic tasks such as "cleaning the floor" to fragmented housework and companionship, making demands harder to standardize; commercial verification has not been completed yet, the demand for embodied intelligence in households is weak, LeXiang's orders look good, but no one can guarantee that it can achieve large-scale profitability like Dreame's floor scrubbers.
Conclusion
From Yu Hao's one hundred trillion at the beginning of the year to Guo Renjie's three questions to OpenAI in September, the Dreame camp has pushed the strategy of "seizing narrative power first, and making up for delivery later" to the extreme in 2026.
Yu Hao's motors and cleaning categories have passed this stage, while LeXiang's robots and litigation are still on the way.
What can high-profile operations bring?
There may be an answer by the end of 2026!
This article is from WeChat Official Account "Yiou" (ID: i-yiou), written by Liu Zhengxin, authorized for release by 36Kr.