Name: I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird. | WSJ
Uploaded: 2025-11-07T13:01:43.000Z
Duration: 9 min 15 s
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For $20,000, you can pre order one X's Neo robot now with delivery in 2026.

I think you missed a tiny spot over here.

There may be a human behind the curtain pulling the robot's strings.

A company representative may need to peer into your house via Neo's camera eyes to get things done.

You have to be okay with this for the product to be useful.

Neo home robots have had two big challenges.

Creating a safe and capable body and a smart brain.

1X is taking on both of those, which is why Neo looks so different from a more industrial factory Robot.

It's a combination of safety and just also generally aesthetics.

You can think of it kind of like a skin, except if it was an actual skin, that would probably be pretty creepy.

But I actually wasn't all that creeped out by Neo inside Nio.

It really starts with some very, very powerful motors that we have developed here at 1x.

These motors are so strong and light that instead of using the classical gears that you see in robots, we can actually pull on tendons loosely.

This allows Neo to move around not just quietly and smoothly, but

also be very, very lightweight and be very low energy in motion, just like people.

That lightweight design is intended for our safety in case the 66 pound robot falls.

Although Neo is capable of lifting up to 150 pounds, it's not as superhuman as you'd think.

There's this concept that we think that robots are like superhuman in pressure and strength.

And some robots are because they're heavily geared.

But that means you're not sensitive, right?

So the finger strength of Neo is about the same as a human.

That body lets Neo try to do a lot of things humans do.

If only the real world didn't have doors all in.

It took Neo a little over a minute to fetch a water from the fridge 10ft away.

The Neo I saw isn't the one shipping in 2026.

The new model will be safer and have better hand dexterity.

The one I saw still needed to take breaks to charge and cool down.

The body has to perform tasks safely, but

the brain needs to know how to do them on its own without human help.

But right now, everything I saw Neo do was guided by a skilled pilot.

Teleoperation is essentially when there is a human in the loop.

And who is the voice I'm hearing right now of Neo?

I am a remote operator in a different room in the building.

Like that's your name on your birth certificate.

Believe it or not, Alan Turing was of course the famous computer science and artificial intelligence pioneer.

But this Turing, with a VR headset and controllers, was the one actually operating Neo.

That is, until he handed me the controllers.

Why does Neo need to be operated like this in the first place?

Because its brain, AKA an AI neural network, needs to learn from more real world experience.

The videos of the robot doing things via teleoperation become the training data to make the AI model smarter.

That's why One X is putting Neo in the homes of early adopters.

I think it's quite important for me to just say that in 2026, if you buy this product, it is because you're okay with that social contract.

If we don't have your data, we can't make the product better.

I'm a big fan of what I call like Big Brother, Big Sister principle.

Big Brother is just there to kind of monitor you.

Depending on how much you want to trade, we, we can be more useful.

And you decide where on that scale you want to be.

Do you right now know what things Neo in 2026 will do autonomously versus what it will do teleoperated.

So when you get your Neo in 2026, it will do most of the things in your home autonomously.

The quality of that work will vary and will improve drastically quite fast as we get data.

To be clear, on my visit, I didn't see Neo do anything autonomously.

The company did share this video of Nio autonomously.

You know there's this new trending concept now called AI Slop, right?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird. | WSJ

delicate

concept

creepy

strength