At their plush headquarters, we were given a tour of a restricted area where NEO prototypes are being built, tested and repaired.
Norwegian CEO Bernt Børnich says NEO is very useful in his own home, busily hoovering and tidying up after his family, which he says is “a mix” of autonomous action and human-operated.
“We have a lot of data so a lot of the stuff in my home can get automated but periodically someone kind of steps in and helps,” he says.
Data is key to how these robots are learning to navigate our chaotic home environments – a much tougher task than humanoids designed for factories.
Part of 1X’s plans to improve NEO’s AI brains is to get it out to homes this year.
1X is confident that NEO will be far more capable on its own thanks to recent AI developments.
But we weren’t shown any demos of the bot thinking for itself.
The first wave of customers will probably have to be very patient and not that worried about privacy with human operators remotely controlling it when the bot gets confused.
They will also have to be wealthy as NEO will cost around $20,000 or $500 a month.
“A lot of our early customers are people who will actually have a lot of value from this, but I do think getting the right customers is important. We can use these amazing early adopters to help us make this work,” Børnich says.