Is having a real robot creepy? I don't know. Is having a robot operated by a human creepy and scary? Absolutely yes.
We've seen that people behave worse when you introduce indirection. People act worse on the internet. Soldiers have an easier time killing with drones than in person. The ethical issue is in both directions: its inhumane to the operator, but I also don't want to feel like a fake person on a video screen to them.
This is then exacerbated when you realize that the people operating this machine are almost certainly not being paid well, creating obvious and legitimate negative incentives. Then you plop them into the households of people with the insane wealth required to afford this. You might think that I have just described the situation with maids (and to some extent, I agree! I have never really felt comfortable that dynamic either), but this is actually different, because you are adding in the indirection and making actions and interactions feel less "real" to both parties: the clients are likely to treat the robots worse than they would a human helper, and the operators may feel these rude clients they see on their monitors aren't as real as the people around them.
I think they intend this as a step for getting enough training data in order not to need a human in the loop. I have actually been following 1x and what was Halodi(they merged at some point) for a while and their intention is full autonomy.
Besides having someone strange in your house, you also have the company probably recording stuff. Privacy wise... It's worse. But that makes me not as concerned with safety since it any misbehavior would quickly be detected.
it’s even worse, with maids, given the socioeconomic dynamics, even if they are paid low, they will be paid “local-market-rates” where by definition they will have to earn enough to (maybe barely) live nearby the people paying them,
teleoperated robots don’t have that incentive and can pay “international low” levels of compensation
Right, but the low income countries could also frame it as a new way to earn a living. I think avoiding giving jobs to those countries gives them no help.
I tried to search for what the acronym "Neo" is based on but no luck. Maybe it's a cinematic reference that got assigned in development and stuck. I don't know.
But it did remind me of my friend Ben Skora and his robot AROK. Fabricated in his garage using sheet metal (Ben rebuilt cars), power window motors, dryer vent pipe for arms, a Richard Nixon halloween mask inside a motorcycle helmet, two car batteries and wheels as shoes, bicycle brake clamps covered with rubber gloves as hands, a front panel of lights that blinked, and miles of wiring that never worked 100%.
The whole system was analog. Tones from two princess phone keypads controlled the motors and he could talk and listen remotely (20 ft away) using a hacked set of walkie-talkies. Don't ask me how.
AROK was built in ~1971-1973 and now resides inside a glass case at the Moraine Valley Community College Technology Building. [1]
He built AROK to help around the house, do chores, walk the dog, etc.
I'm wondering about teleoperation. Many housekeeping activities require an incredible level of attention to detail, precision, and real-time awareness. For example, consider manual dishwashing, small sewing jobs, knife operation, or repotting houseplants.
Even if latency were not an issue, the operator would need to excel at all these tasks.
By the way, we've had robotic surgery [1] for years. These machines are very expensive, and it takes months, if not years, to learn to operate them flawlessly.
Oh, this was the plot of the Mexican sci-fi movie The Sleep Dealer: [0]
From Wikipedia: "A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants."
Add on top of that the latency of the operator's equipment and the latency of the robot itself, and tasks like putting dishes in the dishwasher could get quite challenging
At long last, a personal robot that can shatter my Waterford glassware and then clean up all the pieces! Sure, it moves like something out of a nightmare, but it makes sense that much of its marketing is aimed at seniors. It's a large and growing market, and the need is undeniable, given that few can afford a full-time caregiver. And from that perspective, the $20,000 price tag almost feels like a steal.
A human-knitted marvel that does it all. From telling cayenne apart from paprika to cleaning your toilet.... well, maybe. From what I can tell, it can flush but not wipe, so you'll still want to budget for a bidet.
Technically, it makes Level-5 autonomy look straightforward. At least roads have rules and standards; household bathrooms, not so much. But let's gloss over that, because I want to know more about the legal agreement you'll have to sign. IANAL, but I expect something akin to a carpet-bombing of blanket disclaimers: no liability for direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, punitive, or other damages—including injuries or loss of life—or really anything else that could go wrong, such as losing your mail, opening your door to assist in a robbery, setting your house on fire, flooding it, or sending your banking information to a Nigerian prince. Too bad iRobot never got around to explaining the legal side of things, but there's always hope for iRobot 2.
Presumably, this is a way to collect diverse training data for the robot to be trained on. Wash and fold as a service is valuable (to some people), and presumable the “extra steps” are offset with the in-home aspect of this.
Meanwhile, the ethical considerations are huge. Laborers are literally training their replacement, and probably at questionable wages. They’re also explicitly inviting someone into your home remotely, and that person can see and interact with your house. Feels like a privacy and safety risk. Additionally, it seems likely that this would be a literal Trojan horse to allow international labor to work within the US without dealing with actual immigration. Oh and just for good measure, it’s taking the jobs traditionally held by some of society’s least privileged and most desperate workers.
Anyways, if it actually works, I want one.
Edit: I feel compelled to note that apparently they’re hiring in Palo Alto for these roles, today.
Develop practices and training regimen at home office, pay well to attract quality talent, develop a positive reputation, lock users in with expensive hardware, outsource and offshore, enshittify aggressively.
I'd expect it to be a training session with admin privileges. Similar to a robot vacuum learning the layout of the house and mapping maybe? Just with added steps based on where the washing machine, detergent etc are located.
I don't think its a training session. Current AI models are pre-trained before deployment for inference. After the model is trained, they load it into the robots computer, and it runs inference with that model.
You can't train the model again because you don't have enough memory on the robot, but also even if you did its slow and consumes energy. You could have it train in some server but then every new skill would require you to pay the equivalent price for renting a bunch of GPUs for many hours.
What they can do is, for everyone, have a base model, and then improve it over time. Then, with software updates they can improve the set of skills the robot can handle out of the box.
But this is the problem with current AI systems, without a continuous learning capability, you're always limited to the "default skills". As soon as you have something out of the box for the robot to do, you end up needing Indians to learn it.
All of AI is flawed in this way. LLMs for instance have almost no continuous learning capability, that is why we don't have AGI yet. They can't learn new skills. Therefore, they can't adapt to new jobs they have not seen during training. They can't even play pokemon properly or any complex game for that matter, because games involve learning new skills during gameplay.
It's most likely just a remote piloted session that's fed into the bucket for the robot to train on unfamiliar tasks/edge cases for known tasks. Falls in line with the true meaning of AI being Actually Indians.
Companies found out that hiring indians and teleoperate the “robot” is far cheaper than having an autonomy or AI algorithms with sensors on-board. Speaking of, all these food delivery “robots” were/are teleoperated as well over the internet as well.
I preordered one for $20k (so I'd get it earlier), but it's going to live in only public areas of house, outdoors, etc., due to privacy concerns. I think it will probably be sufficiently useful to be worthwhile, but I'll probably wait a few weeks from public launch to be more sure.
The fact that it feels like we're really getting there. The product is not perfect, and most importantly not shipped yet, but it's one of first humanoid robots I saw with a price tag and customer focus.
Point being, we might be at an iPhone-like pivotal moment for home robots.
In the same way that a Tesla Model Y isn't so different from a golf cart.
If you showed a 1980s EE any component taken from the Neo, it'd look like science fiction. Some of the least sophisticated parts (motors & batteries) are still an order of magnitude better than anything available 40 years ago; the most sophisticated (processors, memory, camera sensors) are at least six orders of magnitude better. The Pentagon of the 1980s would have fought a small war to get their hands on a few of the MEMS IMU chips that we put in video game controllers.
This feels like the exact opposite of disconnected?
The last few years of tech have been full of keynotes with AI that can make art, AI that can send heartfelt messages for you, AI to make music, etc - All things people actually like to do and want to do.
This is a $500/mo robot that can do household chores so you don’t have to. Many people in America (estimated >10%) spend a few hundred a month already on actually hiring cleaners to visit their house and clean biweekly. This is cost-comparable and a task no one wants to spend time on.
This is a luxury, but it’s a top-25th percentile luxury not top 0.1%.
I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great.
And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.
Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to:
* Tidy up.
* Clean
* Do laundry
* Help with other stuff
Seems well worth $500/mo. I don't expect that V1 of this technology will be able to effectively do all that stuff, but I'm hopeful that v2 or v5 might be able to.
On a related note, "folding laundry" seems to be a really hard challenge for machine learning to solve. Solutions like "Foldimate" kind of work if you individually hand it every piece in the right way - but nothing seems to be cable of having a human dump a bin of washed clothes in and spitting out nicely folded laundry. And everything so far that's promised to do that seems to be vaporware.
Slower is only a problem if you're waiting on the machine. I recently purchased one of those "all in one" heatpump washer and dryers. It is indeed on a per wash basis slower than my old separate washer and dryer. But over the course of a week and multiple loads, the total time spent is about the same or possibly even less.
Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.
A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.
I'm skeptical too, but the fact that it works slower isn't too much of a problem if it doesn't require human attention and finishes before one is back home. It's just like how the Roomba can take as much time as it needs to to vacuum the living room when I'm gone for the day, as long as it's done by the time I get back.
You’re right, it’s so unrealistic to imagine that maybe a hominid telepresence platform in your home with a human operator might get operated by its operator to do some type of weird privacy-violating stuff. Only a crazy person would dream of such a thing.
This is like the online trend of pretending that US Postal Police are superheroes, clowns are scary, fedoras are lame and so on. I get it.
Some people make jokes, and then the rest don't get the joke so they think it's real and go along with the meme out of wanting to fit in. Eventually, the neurotic find everything scary and dangerous. Everyone else just skips over this nonsense while you guys self-reinforce. Social media's worst effect.
In other words, nothing very labor/skill intensive yet.
And if you let your robot feed your pets, they will eventually love the robot more than you. I suppose that's the last activity you'd want to hand over to an inanimate object.
Oof. The roomba guy said that the form factor of robots inform customer expectations. I keep thinking about that and wincing when I see these humanoid robots. Even if there's impressive engineering that goes into them, people are going to expect they can do human things. When they can't, they're going to be disappointed.
I expect my robot vacuum to vacuum the floor, because it's a little wheeled disc on the floor. It's not going to be able to cook for me. But this thing? Yea, it should cook for me.
Form factor isn't what is important. What is important is the jobs it gets done. If it can do useful jobs we will accept the form factor. Roomba doesn't look like any other vacuum I've never owned, but it gets the floors clean so we learn that form factor means clean floors.
Humanoid only seems useful if it can do stairs - something many form factors fail at. Though I'd expect a centaur form factor could do stairs better and probably is cheaper.
Although these particular units are designed for home use, commercial applications are not far off, perhaps in the order of months.
Small and medium-sized businesses will start thinking that it's much better to lease a unit for $500/mo. than $2,000/mo. in payroll for one human. Then they own the unit after 3 years. We're going to need some form of UBI soon.
Surely the overlap between people with both the wealth and the preference for industrial machinery remote controlled by an underpaid worker from the Philippines in their house (around their children) over an organic house keeper is vanishingly thin, no?
The total addressable market for giant fighting robots on the other hand...
I cannot legally get a Philippine worker in my house at a price I could afford. Well I haven't checked on the exact immigration rules, but I don't have to bother to tell you that I can't get one that is enough underpaid that I could afford one. There evidence that elsewhere in the world people with similar wealth to mine have them, but they are not available in the US. I don't care who does the work so long as I can afford it and it is legal - which rules out slaves.
For purpose of this discussion I'm ignoring ethics (other than slaves and there I resorted to legal concerns to sidestep the issue) - If it was possible for me to get an affordable human in my house I would no longer be able to ignore those issues.
>by an underpaid worker from the Philippines in their house (around their children)
I think that it's hilarious (in a grim way) that we got this thing : a 30kg robot with no proven reliability performing dynamic/active balancing at all times and everyone jumps to the fear of 'The Scary Foreigner' rather than the fact that this actively power-damp'd mass is actively trying to fall backwards or forwards, being held together by whatever control loop, onto your toddler or pet.
A single non-redundant power-failure is orders of a scarier proposition to me than a foreigner with a bad attitude : you can fix that with management and action auditing , more than a single person in the loop, etc. You can't fix the future awaiting technical failure.
We still haven't fixed bad technicals in any industry yet -- we occasional get bad planes delivered to customers. We have technical failures in pacemakers.
Sorry that's not what i was trying to convey, but rather the elaborate loop hole to exploit cheap off shore labor over domestic workers. And yeah to your point about bad technical, plus my focus on the high powered hardware, all add up to legitimate safety concerns.
Is this thing vastly more anatomically correct than most humanoids? Thumbs are opposable, finger roots are somewhat more behind than most, has shoulders(at all), torso has at least pitch in the middle, etc etc. I don't know if it matters, but that looks cool to me.
I predict it will never ship, and further there is no market for an ambulatory speakerphone/LLM combo with a human on the other end of the phone (which is how it operates).
Wouldn’t something like an Apple Watch be much more reliable for alerting emergency services in case of seizure, given that fall detection is an actually advertised feature of it?
I want to believe its true, but this seems like quite a leap forward, at that price point. Even without AI, would we know if the videos were just a person in a suit?
It was the first thing I also thought, but then I thought that would be ridiculous. But now I watched this video. And in fact, it's actually currently completely operated remotely. With the idea that they'll collect the human operated movements as training data for de AI. But right now they say the robot can autonomously only open a door.
So if you get the product now, then when the robot is operating, there's basically an extra person in your home.
You can apparentlty choose when it operates, and you can also block certain spaces in your house from the robot able to reach it. But it does feel to me like a recipe for disasters.
The leap is not really there yet and it's cheap because you are the product. The robot will be a massive headache, will work poorly for most tasks, frequently break and require maintenance. In exchange for $500/mo and providing those test hours in a novel environment and the data that goes with it, you get to have a robot in your house that occasionally does something right. The bet being made here is that they can turn that data hose into a useful robot before this poor customer experience tanks their brand.
The part of the video showing the robot putting glasses in the upper cabinet. It is something normal for humans, but it felt scary watching it being done by that robot. Maybe it was how it was handling the glass, maybe another kind of uncanny valley, or how I think present software should handle that task today. But I don't think it is ready yet to match our expectations.
The issue is might be the latency with teleop, by the time the operator realizes the glass is about to tip over, it's probably already fallen on the floor. So the robot can really only do one object at a time, and has to move about awkwardly. I do like all the ideas though, I hope they can get it to a polished state.
Could it do stairs if it was wheeled? Not every house has them, but most do (where I live basements are universal in single family houses, but other regions basements are rare)
In this case, if you needed this for whatever reason, I suspect the lease makes sense to not get stuck with a Gen1 product after the same cost point of 40 months.
IDK, this is not a problem I need to concern myself with. I’m clearly not the target demographic.
Per the keynote video, the bodysuit is machine washable.
As long as 1X stays in business or enthusiasts exist, I have to imagine there will be some option to clean/replace the head covering on the $20,000 robot.
I just think about how things are when they are brand new versus their in-use appearance.
Think about a MacBook that’s a couple of years old. Glossy letters on the keycaps, a couple of sneeze splatters on the screen, some cosmetic scratches.
I actually stopped using a phone case because I liked the dings and scratches on my phone. The wear made it feel like my device.
As for cloth, I feel similarly about my worn flannel shirts and some chunky-knit sweaters, but not car seats or white shirts with some tomato-sauce stain on them.
Assuming this style of robot catches on, the designers or enthusiasts may find ways to make the cloth wear feel cozy instead of ratty.
>Cleaning robots are pretty good, and it's mostly a solved problem
everyone that ever tells me that has hardwood or tile floors and a mostly uncluttered house with no doors.
yes: cleaning robots are a solved problem for people with clean uncluttered houses free of long-hair pets or a spouse/etc with a laundry-throwing problem.
Kohler once made a gold plated toilet seat as a display item for their show rooms.
The Kohler rep near me was pretty surprised when someone walked in and offered ridiculous cash for the seat on display. The buyer explained... "There is no way I can impress my guests more than having them realize that even the toilet seat is gold plated." Kohler wound up selling the whole run.
Nothing, perhaps, less than a Humanoid robot that is almost as good as Roomba.
People will pay a crazy amount of money to show off.
So, like a large scale scam to get your "downpayment" ?
How would remote human operators scale, especially for the $20k "ownership" model? I presume the actual hardware probably costs them at least $10k to make, so after about 400 hours of "remote operator use", it's all loss on the company?
I suspect they have a limit on use, or a pay-to-use-remotely thing they neglected to announce.
There is no way that the $500/mo or $20k flat price points are profitable. Cash influx is definitely important, but it seems to me that the real "value" from deploying with remote operators to handle any interesting tasks is in building an in-home data moat.
That could be profitable if it works well. If it proves very useful in the real world owners will brag about and talk about it making this the "in thing" to have. When people buy it that means they can scale. If this takes off I expect in 10 years the price will be about $5000 each and they are selling enough to make a lot of money. I'm assuming that they will design/build it to last about 10 years before wearing out which means repeat customers - not quite as good as a subscription but still something wall street likes to see.
There are a lot of best cases in the above. Time will tell if it works. I'm not betting on it, but I'm cautious so don't read too much into that.
Is having a real robot creepy? I don't know. Is having a robot operated by a human creepy and scary? Absolutely yes.
We've seen that people behave worse when you introduce indirection. People act worse on the internet. Soldiers have an easier time killing with drones than in person. The ethical issue is in both directions: its inhumane to the operator, but I also don't want to feel like a fake person on a video screen to them.
This is then exacerbated when you realize that the people operating this machine are almost certainly not being paid well, creating obvious and legitimate negative incentives. Then you plop them into the households of people with the insane wealth required to afford this. You might think that I have just described the situation with maids (and to some extent, I agree! I have never really felt comfortable that dynamic either), but this is actually different, because you are adding in the indirection and making actions and interactions feel less "real" to both parties: the clients are likely to treat the robots worse than they would a human helper, and the operators may feel these rude clients they see on their monitors aren't as real as the people around them.
I think they intend this as a step for getting enough training data in order not to need a human in the loop. I have actually been following 1x and what was Halodi(they merged at some point) for a while and their intention is full autonomy.
Besides having someone strange in your house, you also have the company probably recording stuff. Privacy wise... It's worse. But that makes me not as concerned with safety since it any misbehavior would quickly be detected.
it’s even worse, with maids, given the socioeconomic dynamics, even if they are paid low, they will be paid “local-market-rates” where by definition they will have to earn enough to (maybe barely) live nearby the people paying them,
teleoperated robots don’t have that incentive and can pay “international low” levels of compensation
Right, but the low income countries could also frame it as a new way to earn a living. I think avoiding giving jobs to those countries gives them no help.
Yep, we’re going to have robots molesting women and kids.
I tried to search for what the acronym "Neo" is based on but no luck. Maybe it's a cinematic reference that got assigned in development and stuck. I don't know.
But it did remind me of my friend Ben Skora and his robot AROK. Fabricated in his garage using sheet metal (Ben rebuilt cars), power window motors, dryer vent pipe for arms, a Richard Nixon halloween mask inside a motorcycle helmet, two car batteries and wheels as shoes, bicycle brake clamps covered with rubber gloves as hands, a front panel of lights that blinked, and miles of wiring that never worked 100%.
The whole system was analog. Tones from two princess phone keypads controlled the motors and he could talk and listen remotely (20 ft away) using a hacked set of walkie-talkies. Don't ask me how.
AROK was built in ~1971-1973 and now resides inside a glass case at the Moraine Valley Community College Technology Building. [1]
He built AROK to help around the house, do chores, walk the dog, etc.
[0] https://cyberneticzoo.com/robots/1975-arok-ben-skora-america...
[1] https://www.morainevalley.edu/news-story/arok-the-robot-roll...
Their teleoperator position from 3-11 PM, M-F, pays between $22 and $31 an hour with benefits and is onsite in Palo Alto.[1]
I'll be curious if they move those positions to a lower cost-of-living area as they scale up.
1: https://1x.recruitee.com/o/robot-operator
I'm wondering about teleoperation. Many housekeeping activities require an incredible level of attention to detail, precision, and real-time awareness. For example, consider manual dishwashing, small sewing jobs, knife operation, or repotting houseplants. Even if latency were not an issue, the operator would need to excel at all these tasks.
By the way, we've had robotic surgery [1] for years. These machines are very expensive, and it takes months, if not years, to learn to operate them flawlessly.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_surgery
This is the next gig job. Poor people working as servants for rich people halfway across the world.
Oh, this was the plot of the Mexican sci-fi movie The Sleep Dealer: [0]
From Wikipedia: "A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJGQl-dJ6c&pp=ygUUc2xlZXAgZ...
Latency is too bad for that, most of these robot companies don't use poor people more than 1/5 of the world away
Nonsense, Starlink’s latency is like 100 to 200 ms round-trip between China and the United States
Add on top of that the latency of the operator's equipment and the latency of the robot itself, and tasks like putting dishes in the dishwasher could get quite challenging
At long last, a personal robot that can shatter my Waterford glassware and then clean up all the pieces! Sure, it moves like something out of a nightmare, but it makes sense that much of its marketing is aimed at seniors. It's a large and growing market, and the need is undeniable, given that few can afford a full-time caregiver. And from that perspective, the $20,000 price tag almost feels like a steal.
A human-knitted marvel that does it all. From telling cayenne apart from paprika to cleaning your toilet.... well, maybe. From what I can tell, it can flush but not wipe, so you'll still want to budget for a bidet.
Technically, it makes Level-5 autonomy look straightforward. At least roads have rules and standards; household bathrooms, not so much. But let's gloss over that, because I want to know more about the legal agreement you'll have to sign. IANAL, but I expect something akin to a carpet-bombing of blanket disclaimers: no liability for direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, punitive, or other damages—including injuries or loss of life—or really anything else that could go wrong, such as losing your mail, opening your door to assist in a robbery, setting your house on fire, flooding it, or sending your banking information to a Nigerian prince. Too bad iRobot never got around to explaining the legal side of things, but there's always hope for iRobot 2.
> For any chore it doesn’t know, you can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it, helping NEO learn while getting the job done.
Is this a humanoid robot that's controlled by someone in a call center remotely doing your laundry?
Putting aside ethical reservations about how much they are probably paying per task, that feels like wash and fold with extra steps.
This feels like the only issue is ethical.
Presumably, this is a way to collect diverse training data for the robot to be trained on. Wash and fold as a service is valuable (to some people), and presumable the “extra steps” are offset with the in-home aspect of this.
Meanwhile, the ethical considerations are huge. Laborers are literally training their replacement, and probably at questionable wages. They’re also explicitly inviting someone into your home remotely, and that person can see and interact with your house. Feels like a privacy and safety risk. Additionally, it seems likely that this would be a literal Trojan horse to allow international labor to work within the US without dealing with actual immigration. Oh and just for good measure, it’s taking the jobs traditionally held by some of society’s least privileged and most desperate workers.
Anyways, if it actually works, I want one.
Edit: I feel compelled to note that apparently they’re hiring in Palo Alto for these roles, today.
Develop practices and training regimen at home office, pay well to attract quality talent, develop a positive reputation, lock users in with expensive hardware, outsource and offshore, enshittify aggressively.
I'd expect it to be a training session with admin privileges. Similar to a robot vacuum learning the layout of the house and mapping maybe? Just with added steps based on where the washing machine, detergent etc are located.
I don't think its a training session. Current AI models are pre-trained before deployment for inference. After the model is trained, they load it into the robots computer, and it runs inference with that model. You can't train the model again because you don't have enough memory on the robot, but also even if you did its slow and consumes energy. You could have it train in some server but then every new skill would require you to pay the equivalent price for renting a bunch of GPUs for many hours.
What they can do is, for everyone, have a base model, and then improve it over time. Then, with software updates they can improve the set of skills the robot can handle out of the box.
But this is the problem with current AI systems, without a continuous learning capability, you're always limited to the "default skills". As soon as you have something out of the box for the robot to do, you end up needing Indians to learn it.
All of AI is flawed in this way. LLMs for instance have almost no continuous learning capability, that is why we don't have AGI yet. They can't learn new skills. Therefore, they can't adapt to new jobs they have not seen during training. They can't even play pokemon properly or any complex game for that matter, because games involve learning new skills during gameplay.
> I don't think its a training session. Current AI models are pre-trained before deployment for inference.
It’s a training session. They’re not training the model on the robot in that moment, they’re collecting training data, don’t overthink the details.
It's most likely just a remote piloted session that's fed into the bucket for the robot to train on unfamiliar tasks/edge cases for known tasks. Falls in line with the true meaning of AI being Actually Indians.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250107-invisible-man...
Companies found out that hiring indians and teleoperate the “robot” is far cheaper than having an autonomy or AI algorithms with sensors on-board. Speaking of, all these food delivery “robots” were/are teleoperated as well over the internet as well.
>with extra steps
That one doesn't have to do, hence the appeal.
mechanical turk. fake it till ya make it.
Seems like a way to get non-citizen day laborers at super low rates without the liability.
Sounds like it's remote-controlled if it can't perform some task and that it should learn to do it after being remote-controlled.
Looks like a Dr Who villain and a Bluetooth speaker had a baby.
I read your comment before seeing the robot and that blank stare from those beady eyes made me lose it.
Truly it does look like that.
You just know it's going to creep up on you slowly, then every time you turn around it's slightly closer to you - yet completely still.
I have no mouth and I must scream.
It actually is a Bluetooth speaker:
> Use NEO as a mobile bluetooth speaker anywhere in your home.
Hahah,some things can't be unseen...
Cybertooth
It leans so far into the "infantile, plush, can't hurt anyone" aesthetic that it feels like a horror movie prop.
Good video of how the hardware actually works from the WSJ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so
Literally 5 seconds in and the first claim is already wrong.
"For 20k$, you can pre-order one now"
The pre-order is only $200
But yes, it gives a good perspective about what's the state of the robot right now
That's just semantics. The $200 is the deposit. It's $20,000 to actually buy it once they're ready to ship.
My point was more that it can be cheaper ($200 + $499/month), and it wasn't mentioned
I preordered one for $20k (so I'd get it earlier), but it's going to live in only public areas of house, outdoors, etc., due to privacy concerns. I think it will probably be sufficiently useful to be worthwhile, but I'll probably wait a few weeks from public launch to be more sure.
Review of 1X Neo by the WSJ:
https://youtu.be/f3c4mQty_so?si=pkdj9q5ieoj7pzPc
I just wonder if it has the three laws builtin.
Keynote / Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTYMWadOW7c.
Mind blowing.
What part blows your mind?
The fact that it feels like we're really getting there. The product is not perfect, and most importantly not shipped yet, but it's one of first humanoid robots I saw with a price tag and customer focus.
Point being, we might be at an iPhone-like pivotal moment for home robots.
Don't be too confused by the shape. The 1X isn't so different from the robots of the 1980s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-LrNAKWZfI
In the same way that a Tesla Model Y isn't so different from a golf cart.
If you showed a 1980s EE any component taken from the Neo, it'd look like science fiction. Some of the least sophisticated parts (motors & batteries) are still an order of magnitude better than anything available 40 years ago; the most sophisticated (processors, memory, camera sensors) are at least six orders of magnitude better. The Pentagon of the 1980s would have fought a small war to get their hands on a few of the MEMS IMU chips that we put in video game controllers.
Personally it's the part where some rich dude in SV tells me he's building what sci fi says will save us time to focus on real things
The irony and complete disconnection from the reality of 99% of people is quite mind blowing indeed
This feels like the exact opposite of disconnected?
The last few years of tech have been full of keynotes with AI that can make art, AI that can send heartfelt messages for you, AI to make music, etc - All things people actually like to do and want to do.
This is a $500/mo robot that can do household chores so you don’t have to. Many people in America (estimated >10%) spend a few hundred a month already on actually hiring cleaners to visit their house and clean biweekly. This is cost-comparable and a task no one wants to spend time on.
This is a luxury, but it’s a top-25th percentile luxury not top 0.1%.
Big chic houses with designer furniture and people driving in Porsches. At least they have a good idea of the potential market.
Incredible technology, but that was an insufferable video. Still very cool, I might preorder one!
I hope you do!
I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great.
And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.
Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to:
* Tidy up.
* Clean
* Do laundry
* Help with other stuff
Seems well worth $500/mo. I don't expect that V1 of this technology will be able to effectively do all that stuff, but I'm hopeful that v2 or v5 might be able to.
On a related note, "folding laundry" seems to be a really hard challenge for machine learning to solve. Solutions like "Foldimate" kind of work if you individually hand it every piece in the right way - but nothing seems to be cable of having a human dump a bin of washed clothes in and spitting out nicely folded laundry. And everything so far that's promised to do that seems to be vaporware.
> And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.
Maybe, but you should factor in that many chores can't be done at all, and those that can be done will take ~10x as long.
Slower is only a problem if you're waiting on the machine. I recently purchased one of those "all in one" heatpump washer and dryers. It is indeed on a per wash basis slower than my old separate washer and dryer. But over the course of a week and multiple loads, the total time spent is about the same or possibly even less.
Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.
A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.
I'm skeptical too, but the fact that it works slower isn't too much of a problem if it doesn't require human attention and finishes before one is back home. It's just like how the Roomba can take as much time as it needs to to vacuum the living room when I'm gone for the day, as long as it's done by the time I get back.
Just in time for Halloween nightmares!!!!!!!!
Imagine being a kid and waking up to this sitting in your room, silently watching you sleep.
Imagine how terrified your dog is going to be of this thing, shuffling around or getting stuck with its foot on the edge of a rug.
Imagine finding it going through your underwear drawer when you come home from work early.
And in 5 seconds after the first ones ship, there will be videos of people attaching all kinds of sex toys to it, making it even worse.
"imagine one day you eat your toast and you look down and it's actually cockroaches!"
Man makes up stories. Scares himself.
You’re right, it’s so unrealistic to imagine that maybe a hominid telepresence platform in your home with a human operator might get operated by its operator to do some type of weird privacy-violating stuff. Only a crazy person would dream of such a thing.
Like, this thing is nightmare fuel. They're making up nightmare stories because this uncanny valley horror practically invites the brain to do so.
This is like the online trend of pretending that US Postal Police are superheroes, clowns are scary, fedoras are lame and so on. I get it.
Some people make jokes, and then the rest don't get the joke so they think it's real and go along with the meme out of wanting to fit in. Eventually, the neurotic find everything scary and dangerous. Everyone else just skips over this nonsense while you guys self-reinforce. Social media's worst effect.
Pre-order?
If a company needs pre-orders in this business, they probably lack enough funding to play.
I love the FAQ that for some reason tells you this thing cannot cook but it doesn't tell you what it can actually do
To be fair, the actual “Product” tab that describes the products lists what it can do:
* Water Plants
* Turn off lights
* Get the door
* clean up trash
* Load/Empty dishwasher
* Tidy House
* Laundry
* Bartend Party
* Feed Pets
* Play music as the most over engineered Bluetooth speaker
> the products lists what it can do...
In other words, nothing very labor/skill intensive yet.
And if you let your robot feed your pets, they will eventually love the robot more than you. I suppose that's the last activity you'd want to hand over to an inanimate object.
Occam's razor says this is because it can't actually do anything.
Related thread (8 months ago),
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132260 ("Neo Gamma (Home Humanoid) (1x.tech)"—48 comments)
Oof. The roomba guy said that the form factor of robots inform customer expectations. I keep thinking about that and wincing when I see these humanoid robots. Even if there's impressive engineering that goes into them, people are going to expect they can do human things. When they can't, they're going to be disappointed.
I expect my robot vacuum to vacuum the floor, because it's a little wheeled disc on the floor. It's not going to be able to cook for me. But this thing? Yea, it should cook for me.
Form factor isn't what is important. What is important is the jobs it gets done. If it can do useful jobs we will accept the form factor. Roomba doesn't look like any other vacuum I've never owned, but it gets the floors clean so we learn that form factor means clean floors.
Humanoid only seems useful if it can do stairs - something many form factors fail at. Though I'd expect a centaur form factor could do stairs better and probably is cheaper.
I'm wondering how many people will attempt to get it to give them a handjob. After all, the form factor does have hands.
We need Robot Olympics for household chores
Although these particular units are designed for home use, commercial applications are not far off, perhaps in the order of months.
Small and medium-sized businesses will start thinking that it's much better to lease a unit for $500/mo. than $2,000/mo. in payroll for one human. Then they own the unit after 3 years. We're going to need some form of UBI soon.
Surely the overlap between people with both the wealth and the preference for industrial machinery remote controlled by an underpaid worker from the Philippines in their house (around their children) over an organic house keeper is vanishingly thin, no?
The total addressable market for giant fighting robots on the other hand...
I cannot legally get a Philippine worker in my house at a price I could afford. Well I haven't checked on the exact immigration rules, but I don't have to bother to tell you that I can't get one that is enough underpaid that I could afford one. There evidence that elsewhere in the world people with similar wealth to mine have them, but they are not available in the US. I don't care who does the work so long as I can afford it and it is legal - which rules out slaves.
For purpose of this discussion I'm ignoring ethics (other than slaves and there I resorted to legal concerns to sidestep the issue) - If it was possible for me to get an affordable human in my house I would no longer be able to ignore those issues.
>by an underpaid worker from the Philippines in their house (around their children)
I think that it's hilarious (in a grim way) that we got this thing : a 30kg robot with no proven reliability performing dynamic/active balancing at all times and everyone jumps to the fear of 'The Scary Foreigner' rather than the fact that this actively power-damp'd mass is actively trying to fall backwards or forwards, being held together by whatever control loop, onto your toddler or pet.
A single non-redundant power-failure is orders of a scarier proposition to me than a foreigner with a bad attitude : you can fix that with management and action auditing , more than a single person in the loop, etc. You can't fix the future awaiting technical failure.
We still haven't fixed bad technicals in any industry yet -- we occasional get bad planes delivered to customers. We have technical failures in pacemakers.
Sorry that's not what i was trying to convey, but rather the elaborate loop hole to exploit cheap off shore labor over domestic workers. And yeah to your point about bad technical, plus my focus on the high powered hardware, all add up to legitimate safety concerns.
Gen x will never miss an opportunity to preach.
Yes, it is thin... and stop calling me Shirley.
Is this thing vastly more anatomically correct than most humanoids? Thumbs are opposable, finger roots are somewhat more behind than most, has shoulders(at all), torso has at least pitch in the middle, etc etc. I don't know if it matters, but that looks cool to me.
For those who want to learn something about the product before forking out $20k (or $500/mo), there's a product info page here: https://www.1x.tech/discover/neo-home-robot
I predict it will never ship, and further there is no market for an ambulatory speakerphone/LLM combo with a human on the other end of the phone (which is how it operates).
it might or might not ship. There is an IMMENSE market for $1-2/hr labor worldwide. Even very low skill labor.
I ordered one. They have nailed all the right things in my opinion:
1. Remote teleop with transfer learning
2. Quiet operation (nobody else is doing this)
3. Pulley based hands
For that price, absolutely
Plus I have epilepsy and live alone so this might just save my life
Wouldn’t something like an Apple Watch be much more reliable for alerting emergency services in case of seizure, given that fall detection is an actually advertised feature of it?
I want to believe its true, but this seems like quite a leap forward, at that price point. Even without AI, would we know if the videos were just a person in a suit?
It's mainly operated by a remote worker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so
It was the first thing I also thought, but then I thought that would be ridiculous. But now I watched this video. And in fact, it's actually currently completely operated remotely. With the idea that they'll collect the human operated movements as training data for de AI. But right now they say the robot can autonomously only open a door.
So if you get the product now, then when the robot is operating, there's basically an extra person in your home.
You can apparentlty choose when it operates, and you can also block certain spaces in your house from the robot able to reach it. But it does feel to me like a recipe for disasters.
The leap is not really there yet and it's cheap because you are the product. The robot will be a massive headache, will work poorly for most tasks, frequently break and require maintenance. In exchange for $500/mo and providing those test hours in a novel environment and the data that goes with it, you get to have a robot in your house that occasionally does something right. The bet being made here is that they can turn that data hose into a useful robot before this poor customer experience tanks their brand.
The part of the video showing the robot putting glasses in the upper cabinet. It is something normal for humans, but it felt scary watching it being done by that robot. Maybe it was how it was handling the glass, maybe another kind of uncanny valley, or how I think present software should handle that task today. But I don't think it is ready yet to match our expectations.
The issue is might be the latency with teleop, by the time the operator realizes the glass is about to tip over, it's probably already fallen on the floor. So the robot can really only do one object at a time, and has to move about awkwardly. I do like all the ideas though, I hope they can get it to a polished state.
Will cats scratch it?
They'll either run in fear or destroy it.
Self-charge (https://youtu.be/LTYMWadOW7c?si=Rml7QsJTzDPva1tr&t=366 timestamp intended): the first form of eternal life
A completely new world of legal liability, or plausible deniability.
https://www.1x.tech/neo
How'd they somehow revive Gene Roddenberry to come and pose with Neo?
Since it is remotely operated anyway, it would be much more practical on a stable wheeled base and a pair of DEX-EE hands.
Could it do stairs if it was wheeled? Not every house has them, but most do (where I live basements are universal in single family houses, but other regions basements are rare)
20,000 and a $500 monthly subscription? Am I reading that right? Or is $500 a month an alternate leasing option?
You choose one or the other
In this case, if you needed this for whatever reason, I suspect the lease makes sense to not get stuck with a Gen1 product after the same cost point of 40 months.
IDK, this is not a problem I need to concern myself with. I’m clearly not the target demographic.
I’m wondering how this thing will age. Will the cloth end up getting oil and soil stains and taking on a funk?
Per the keynote video, the bodysuit is machine washable.
As long as 1X stays in business or enthusiasts exist, I have to imagine there will be some option to clean/replace the head covering on the $20,000 robot.
Will it wash itself? Would be totally ironic if we had to strip the robot of its clothes and wash it :)
Buy two and make them wash each other :D
I just think about how things are when they are brand new versus their in-use appearance.
Think about a MacBook that’s a couple of years old. Glossy letters on the keycaps, a couple of sneeze splatters on the screen, some cosmetic scratches.
I actually stopped using a phone case because I liked the dings and scratches on my phone. The wear made it feel like my device.
As for cloth, I feel similarly about my worn flannel shirts and some chunky-knit sweaters, but not car seats or white shirts with some tomato-sauce stain on them.
Assuming this style of robot catches on, the designers or enthusiasts may find ways to make the cloth wear feel cozy instead of ratty.
Can it wash its own bodysuit?
I super duper don’t want to watch it crawl out of its own skin thank you very much for that offer.
Cleaning robots are pretty good, and it's mostly a solved problem, for an order of magnitude (almost 2) under this price point.
What else are we getting AT BEST beside taking out the trash and gimmicks?
>Cleaning robots are pretty good, and it's mostly a solved problem
everyone that ever tells me that has hardwood or tile floors and a mostly uncluttered house with no doors.
yes: cleaning robots are a solved problem for people with clean uncluttered houses free of long-hair pets or a spouse/etc with a laundry-throwing problem.
What? Mostly solved problem? I can think of countless household tasks that I can't think of a robot for
Kohler once made a gold plated toilet seat as a display item for their show rooms.
The Kohler rep near me was pretty surprised when someone walked in and offered ridiculous cash for the seat on display. The buyer explained... "There is no way I can impress my guests more than having them realize that even the toilet seat is gold plated." Kohler wound up selling the whole run.
Nothing, perhaps, less than a Humanoid robot that is almost as good as Roomba.
People will pay a crazy amount of money to show off.
No one is going to put a wig on their roomba though.
yeah, it's lame
Can it cook ?
Looks like it could pass butter, at least.
From their FAQs:
> Initially, NEOs cooking capabilities will be restricted from use. NEO can provide you with great recipes or help with the cleaning up instead.
Huge risk having it operate in a kitchen: open flame, hot liquids, spills, sharps, etc.
The main risk I was thinking of was poisoning you.
Let him cook.
Look at it, clearly only serves tomatoe sauces, red wine, and beets.
The 20k model has no subscription? How does that work? Surely it's using a fair amount of compute, isn't it?
how far we've fallen where the concept of owning something that you bought seems preposterous to some people
I like the idea of "robotics slop" still being useful, compared to the rest of AI slop (https://youtu.be/f3c4mQty_so?si=6Zq0eFq80C0_RGGo&t=345 timestamp intended)
"i have no mouth, and i must scream"
But does this Neo know kung fu?
Pay attention, this is a genius once-in-a-generation business strategy.
Overpromise and underdeliver?
I mean, this is extraordinarily interesting at least.
TBD on if it ships on time, how good it is, etc, but fuck, this is pretty cool.
So, like a large scale scam to get your "downpayment" ?
How would remote human operators scale, especially for the $20k "ownership" model? I presume the actual hardware probably costs them at least $10k to make, so after about 400 hours of "remote operator use", it's all loss on the company?
I suspect they have a limit on use, or a pay-to-use-remotely thing they neglected to announce.
$200 is refundable, so not a scam at all, just holding your spot in line like any other pre-order.
It's pretty clear that they're still working on the AI training so 'human in the loop' is not part of their long term business model.
There is no way that the $500/mo or $20k flat price points are profitable. Cash influx is definitely important, but it seems to me that the real "value" from deploying with remote operators to handle any interesting tasks is in building an in-home data moat.
That could be profitable if it works well. If it proves very useful in the real world owners will brag about and talk about it making this the "in thing" to have. When people buy it that means they can scale. If this takes off I expect in 10 years the price will be about $5000 each and they are selling enough to make a lot of money. I'm assuming that they will design/build it to last about 10 years before wearing out which means repeat customers - not quite as good as a subscription but still something wall street likes to see.
There are a lot of best cases in the above. Time will tell if it works. I'm not betting on it, but I'm cautious so don't read too much into that.