Tuesday evening, a little-known company called 1x Technologies dropped a nearly 10-minute video announcing the launch of Neo, “the home robot.” It was one of those videos that the company surely thought would break the internet by showcasing something groundbreaking, and it inserted some Super 8-style footage to make it appear as though Neo, a fabric-wrapped robot, is just another member of the family.
It may have achieved the “break the internet” part of its goal, as the launch video racked up nearly 30 million views (though that is by X’s notoriously unreliable count). But it didn’t take long for the seemingly tightly wound threads that give the bot its sock monkey exterior to start to come apart, beginning with the Wall Street Journal’s hands-on review of Neo.
First, the major revelation: Neo isn’t just a humanoid robot; it’s actually controlled by a human. Stern revealed that Neo is currently fully teleoperated, controlled by a real person performing tasks remotely and using a virtual reality headset to see through the beady camera eyes of the robot. So, for the low, low price of $20,000 or $500 per month, you can invite a stranger into your home to sort of do your chores for you.
“Sort of” is important to note here because Stern’s review also revealed that Neo isn’t really good at anything that it’s supposed to do. Stern said the robot “nearly toppled over” while closing a dishwasher, took two minutes to fold a single shirt, and struggled to open a refrigerator door. If the robot were doing all of that autonomously, it would at least be something closer to a technically impressive achievement, if still short of the type of proficiency you’d want from your dedicated housekeeper. But it’s that bad at completing its tasks while requiring you to surrender the serenity of your home to a “1X Expert”—the remote operator dedicated to making the robot function.
Who are you inviting into your home, exactly, anyway? According to 1X Technologies’ website, 1X Experts are “1X employees physically present in the USA.” And for now, that’s the only way Neo can operate. The company is basically banking on enough people being cool with this arrangement to use them as data-rich guinea pigs. “If you buy this product, it is because you’re OK with that social contract. If we don’t have your data, we can’t make the product better,” 1X CEO Bernt Børnich told WSJ.
Users do have the ability to restrict some of what the operator sees, including blocking certain rooms and blurring faces, but that video is going back to the company for training data. That’s the lifeblood 1X is after, and you can give it to them for just $20,000. Børnich rather brazenly called Neo “safer” than hiring a real house cleaner, which… no? You can vet a professional cleaner yourself; most have reputations in the form of online reviews, and none of them wear cameras and store every detail of your home.
Børnich has a unique view of how Neo and robotics broadly should work that basically boils down to “get used to the fact this sucks.” In a conversation with Stern, the CEO compared Neo’s current lack of ability to get through any given task without teetering on the brink of failure to AI-generated images and videos with obvious errors and inaccuracies. He calls it “Robotics slop” and expects that people will accept “good enough” from their robo-helper until it actually becomes good enough to do the things promised from the start.
In this way, Neo does feel entirely new. Not in the fact that it is a personal home robot, but in the fact that part of the very expensive deal that you are being asked to enter into is to accept that you are buying a piece of shit and paying to train it to get better for others. Companies overpromise and underdeliver all the time. Rarely do they tell people explicitly, “give us money and accept that this doesn’t work, because one day it might.”
English (US) ·