I Lived With a Humanoid Robot for 48 Hours

this is the first time that we've ever deployed a humanoid in a home and to our knowledge the first time anyone's ever done this in a home if you want robs to be truly intelligent they actually have to learn Among Us they have to live among people and learn from this so this is our new roommate as soon as we finished filming last week's episode with Neo we didn't part ways instead the 1X team put Neo in a car and took him to my apartment to live with me for 2 days science fiction is long

promised that one day we could have humanoid robots in our homes helping us with everyday tasks like chores housekeeping and even cooking but that's not what I was most interested in how would it feel to have a robot in my home would it be strange or uncomfortable how would my friends and roommates feel but before I can answer those questions I had a few for Eric one of Neo's creators so in a few days you guys are going to deliver a Neo to live with me in my apartment for 2 days in a night I'm

very excited I'm also a little nervous and curious about what the experience would be like as well as what it will be like for future users who will have NEOS in their homes yeah we're super excited as well to bring Neo to your home I think it's actually the first time that a humanoid is being put into a person's home uh to do chores Neo is going to be excited to meet your laundry and your friends okay great for Neo to learn everything he needs to learn he needs to be in the home we want

to make sure that we can serve some like actual useful use cases so so if Neo can't do your coffee or make your bed it's not going to be useful in the home so today we're going to try out some of these tasks that are going to prove whether or not Neo can be the first at home humanoid okay I'm in my bedroom uh there's a team of 1x robotics engineers outside of my bedroom who have asked me to stay in here until they until they tell me to come out Neo is making coffee apparently

Kevin can you go get Jason real quick yeah see what's going [Music] on Neo made it but you did he really you handed it to me I swear okay you actually made it y wash the tape we're running back I think most roboticists would think that a humanoid in your home for a long time is just not possible and obviously like we're filming this is pretty set up but you guys are planning on shipping these things as soon as next year and scaling up pretty rapidly pretty quickly and I think I don't know what's the

biggest difference in your mind with with 1X and its approach to to robotics NE is uniquely capable of being in the house as you can see like right now um so like we want to start there because ultimately that's where intelligence is created you know you have you know we have humans they grow up in homes they get all this diverse data they start to learn about the world like we think our robots should learn that way too I I do think the path to truly intelligent Androids so that we can actually have billions of

them on the planet doing all kinds of physical labor is first through the home so that you have this diversity of data and then after that you can go and capture like Manufacturing Services whatever doesn't really matter this is in contrast to the more wedge strategy where you start with one deployment doing one task and you solve that task it's really a question of like how diverse is it and how much of that do you have so by going to the home the sort of end game right from the start then we're collecting the right

data distribution to do this Neo can you get me the peppers and mushrooms thank you sir Neo I'm I'm curious how should I cook these ball Peppers sauté them with a bit of olive oil salt and pepper done in minutes uh Neo can you tell me a joke why did the Scarecrow become a successful Mot ational speaker I'm not sure because he was outstanding in his field okay yeah that was a little predictable uh can you hand me an [Music] egg [Music] sir good Sue Chef you're welcome how long until you think I just like

talk you about my problems and hand you the eggs myself like how can we flip this around you know we're getting there but it might be a few more years before robots can handle full cooking duties flawlessly for now I'm here to help and keep you company maybe someday you'll be able to relax while I do all the work Neo uh can you prove that those eggs aren't [Music] hard-boiled so what will support like obviously for the early folks like things will probably go wrong sometimes or or like what's what's the the theory there yeah

so I mean it's not going to be super clean off the bat like it's first generation product uh never been in the home before uh it's not just a first generation product it's a first generation most probably one of Advanced Consumer products of all time yeah and there's a lot of moving parts so I mean you can imagine there's going to be some issues and hiccups so I think one of the most important things if we're going to go into the home is just providing really quality support so if there's an issue getting it solved

the same day making sure that you have as much up time with your robot as possible make sure you can enjoy the experience as much again from day one it's it sounds like it's not right to expect the ne will just fully autonomously work for people the moment they get it for the end of time it sounds like there's still some learning and and training to do the way we're going to tackle this problem is basically by having human teleoperation be a standin for the autonomy on day one so it'll still be useful it do

chores in your house but this is fulfilled by a human operator who's remotely controlling the robot and you can imagine that over time as the AI gets better and better we're replacing small parts of the uh workflow of the tasks and chores with AI kind of like the ship of thesis right where you swap out one plank at a time and then eventually it's a completely new ship that's powered by AI rather than humans can you talk about kind of some of the AI systems that are are working now and that you want to get

working in the future for for Neo yeah one kind of data that we're really interested in with Neo in the home is interactions with people so for example um if I go like this Neil would understand what I'm trying to do if I go like this it'll kind of understand what I'm trying to do and like uh you know play the game and this kind of interaction where it sees humans and needs to respond to them you know one aspect of body language is just understanding what people want so if I go like this Neo

should just understand it wants I want it to take the the wallet and I if I go like this it should give it back to me right so everyday life is full of all kinds of these human uh interactions and by having it in the home you can get robots to actually understand what people want cool all right thank you neo I guess we'll leave you here thanks on day one when we deliver the robot the Neo will basically get a guided tour of your home so you'll visit your living room your kitchen show where

the the rags are in the closet and it'll just get a general spatial understanding of your home from this we'll train the ability to have it navigate autonomously in your home and um in terms of training the tests autonomously what we'll do is that once we have some data with a human tele operation doing tasks we'll feed that into our data engine where the robot can now start to predict what the human tele operator would do uh for a given chore with a bunch of these skills like going to your fridge and opening a fridge

and getting a drink out we'll train them together um using another AI model that will basically allow us to stitch together a very long Horizon set of skills and that can accomplish things like doing some chores or fetching you a beer and so forth um over time more and more of these skills will be fulfilled by the AI bottles um and uh instead of teleoperation and we'll try to phase that out over the course of next year lots of throny questions around AI Safety Human privacy um physical safety and so forth on the physical safety

side it's really important that the robot doesn't injure people and part of our mechanical design is based on that principle that we want to make sure it has very low kinetic energy but even so you have to be really careful about what you're doing U passive safety is important and crucial and necessary but not everything so for example the robot has to learn how to avoid dangerous situations it has to know how to recover from failures and it has to know where the no-go zones in a house for example not getting too close to the

banister so that it might fall off not getting too close to you know fragile objects and things like that that's on physical safety on user privacy you know I'm going to have one of these in my home as well very soon and I don't want it to see certain things in my house so as a as a you know User it's really important that like the user has control over um what the Neo is able to see and uh what we're able to train on from the capability sampoint so you can think about it as

the user has complete control over what they allow the do to see if you've ever seen um that that episode of Black Mirror where certain people are kind of masked out by um by kind of blurs uh images that's what we're doing as well where the user can control what things are blurred out from the Neo's point of view from a privacy standpoint it's also important that there are Geo fences so that the operator cannot go places that the user doesn't want them to go so it's definitely a very tricky problem but we're trying to

work through ways to solve that and then finally on the AI safety side of things you know once we have uh users being able to train their own NEOS there's a very analogous problem to chat Bots today where you want to make sure that users not requesting the robot to do things that would be unsafe to the robot or unsafe to the human or the environment the only other safety I guess I'm curious about is sort of the cyber security aspect of Neo or or the ability for to keep people that shouldn't be accessing Neo

out and like how you guys think about that right by far that's one of the most important concerns in building a you know good product here cyber security directly translates to physical safety of our users and the reason why that the stakes are so high in this case is that if someone um is actually able to cause harm with by hacking into a Neo not not only does that kill One X that probably will set back the entire industry of humanoid Robotics and general purpose robotics in the home by decades right so uh we take

that extremely seriously and red teaming and security audits are just the start of what we're doing to make sure that our product is safe and we'll have a much more detailed plan that we're going to share in the future before we go to market if you want DBL to be truly intelligent they actually have to learn Among Us they have to live among people they have to experience our world they have to do experiments observe the outcomes and learn from this 2025 is going to be all about going to the home and 2026 is then

going to be all about scaling that thousand in 25 tens of thousand in 2026 hundreds of thousands in 2027 and then millions in 2028 he picked up the egg and in hand it to me and it was just so like it felt very Monumental I guess it it it was a very strange feeling because obviously like we're filming this for an episode like there's people with cameras and some of the engineers from 1X were standing by but I don't know just it felt like a Sci-Fi moment becoming reality so this is our new roommate it's

pretty cool right this is very cool rock paper scissors How do you guys feel with him living here as our new roommate he'll pay rent I'm I'm game on next week's S3 we're looking at a company that wants to do big things in a small way and I might get a little wet this was a very special episode of S3 to film everyone involved felt it was a pretty surreal experience having a real humanoid in a real home for the first time it's a moment we won't forget and something we wanted to capture the feeling

of in this week's Time Capsule piece thank you for watching episode 54 of S3 and supporting our work we'll see you next next week but until then keep on building the future [Music]