According to the company’s CEO Børnich, Norwegian robot startup 1X plans to start early testing of its humanoid robot, Neo Gamma, with “hundreds to thousands” of houses by the end of 2025.
“Neo Gamma will be home this year,” Børnich told TechCrunch in an interview with NVIDIA GTC in 2025. “We hope to invite early adopters of this year to help us develop the system. We hope it can live and learn among people and do that for that we need to bring Neo into their homes and help us teach it how to perform. ”
In recent months, the humanoid robots in the house have seemingly reached new heights around the hype.
Digure is a Bay Area-based competitor that competes 1 times, with active social media presence and announced in February that it will also Home testing of its humanoid robots begins in 2025. A few weeks later, Bloomberg reported that the numbers were talking about $1.5 billion raised $40 billion with a staggering sum. According to reports, Openai (1x investor) is also exploring the construction of its own humanoid robot.
But putting heavy metal robots into people’s homes adds a bet to the new industry. It’s no different from self-driving car startups putting their robots on the road. It can Turn south-fast.
However, Børnich still has a long way to go to business scale and autonomy for Neo Gamma.
Although Neo Gamma uses AI for walking and balancing, robots are not fully capable of performing autonomous movements today. To make home testing possible, Børnich said 1x “guid the process” by relying on remote operators – humans in remote locations can view Neo Gamma’s cameras and sensors in real time and control their limbs.
These home tests will allow 1x the data collected on how Neo Gamma works in homes. Early adopters will help create a large, valuable dataset that can be used to train internal AI models and upgrade Neo Gamma’s capabilities.
With Openai’s support, Børnich said 1x training its core AI technology internally today. The company also “once occasionally” trains AI models with partners including the aforementioned OpenAI and Nvidia.
Of course, collecting data from the microphone and camera in people’s homes and then training the AI model on it, which raises many privacy issues. A company spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch that customers can decide when 1x employees can view Neo Gamma’s surroundings – whether for audits or detailed introductions.
Unveiled in FebruaryNeo Gamma is the first bipedal robot prototype to be tested outside the lab. Compared to the Neo Beta, the Neo Gamma has an improved onboard AI model, as well as a knitted nylon body suit, designed to reduce the potential harm from robot to human contact.
In the GTC’s demo, there’s 1X showing Neo Gamma’s ability to perform some basic tasks in a living room setup – partially powered by a human operator. The robot vacuums, waters the plants, and walks around the room without hitting people or furniture. However, this is not perfect. Once, the robot started to shake and then fell into Børnich’s arms. 1x staff blames Spotty Wi-Fi on conference halls and low battery.
Like Figure’s plan, details about the early adopter plan for 1X are far from clear. 1X has not revealed its listing strategy for Neo Gamma, although it does have one Waitlist on its website. It’s also hard to imagine how to use Neo Gamma at home to work without a long distance. The spokesman said 1 times will provide a “more thorough explanation” later.
While there are hundreds of millions of people this year who may try out the new, artificially assisted version of the gamma this year, it seems like we are still years away from the automatic humanoid robots where you can buy shelves.
