1X Neo – Home Robot - Pre Order
95 comments
·October 28, 2025easton
vineyardmike
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.
moralestapia
>with extra steps
That one doesn't have to do, hence the appeal.
mykarakus
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.
luisml77
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.
rtkwe
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.
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tamimio
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.
colordrops
Seems like a way to get non-citizen day laborers at super low rates without the liability.
Hamuko
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.
whalesalad
mechanical turk. fake it till ya make it.
yesfitz
Their teleoperator position from 3-11 PM, M-F, pays between $22 and $31 an hour with benefits and is onsite in Palo Alto.[1]
I'll be curious if they move those positions to a lower cost-of-living area as they scale up.
fainpul
This is the next gig job. Poor people working as servants for rich people halfway across the world.
Taikonerd
Oh, this was the plot of the Mexican sci-fi movie The Sleep Dealer: [0]
From Wikipedia: "A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJGQl-dJ6c&pp=ygUUc2xlZXAgZ...
dexwiz
Looks like a Dr Who villain and a Bluetooth speaker had a baby.
Tade0
I read your comment before seeing the robot and that blank stare from those beady eyes made me lose it.
Truly it does look like that.
sgt
You just know it's going to creep up on you slowly, then every time you turn around it's slightly closer to you - yet completely still.
bigyabai
It leans so far into the "infantile, plush, can't hurt anyone" aesthetic that it feels like a horror movie prop.
xnx
Good video of how the hardware actually works from the WSJ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so
denysvitali
Literally 5 seconds in and the first claim is already wrong.
"For 20k$, 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
sosodev
That's just semantics. The $200 is the deposit. It's $20,000 to actually buy it once they're ready to ship.
mleroy
Review of 1X Neo by the WSJ:
system7rocks
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.
renewiltord
"imagine one day you eat your toast and you look down and it's actually cockroaches!"
Man makes up stories. Scares himself.
binary132
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.
i80and
Like, this thing is nightmare fuel. They're making up nightmare stories because this uncanny valley horror practically invites the brain to do so.
renewiltord
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.
disambiguation
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...
bluGill
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.
serf
>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.
disambiguation
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.
bn-l
Gen x will never miss an opportunity to preach.
supportengineer
Yes, it is thin... and stop calling me Shirley.
denysvitali
Keynote / Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTYMWadOW7c.
Mind blowing.
xnx
What part blows your mind?
lm28469
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
vineyardmike
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%.
denysvitali
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.
xnx
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
Hamuko
Big chic houses with designer furniture and people driving in Porsches. At least they have a good idea of the potential market.
leetharris
Incredible technology, but that was an insufferable video. Still very cool, I might preorder one!
atourgates
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.
xnx
> 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.
birriel
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.
lm28469
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
vineyardmike
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
xnx
Occam's razor says this is because it can't actually do anything.
perihelions
Related thread (8 months ago),
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132260 ("Neo Gamma (Home Humanoid) (1x.tech)"—48 comments)
rozap
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.
Hamuko
I'm wondering how many people will attempt to get it to give them a handjob. After all, the form factor does have hands.
> 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.