Truly it does look like that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132260 ("Neo Gamma (Home Humanoid) (1x.tech)"—48 comments)
As long as 1X stays in business or enthusiasts exist, I have to imagine there will be some option to clean/replace the head covering on the $20,000 robot.
Think about a MacBook that’s a couple of years old. Glossy letters on the keycaps, a couple of sneeze splatters on the screen, some cosmetic scratches.
As for cloth, I feel similarly about my worn flannel shirts and some chunky-knit sweaters, but not car seats or white shirts with some tomato-sauce stain on them.
Assuming this style of robot catches on, the designers or enthusiasts may find ways to make the cloth wear feel cozy instead of ratty.
IDK, this is not a problem I need to concern myself with. I’m clearly not the target demographic.
TBD on if it ships on time, how good it is, etc, but fuck, this is pretty cool.
> Initially, NEOs cooking capabilities will be restricted from use. NEO can provide you with great recipes or help with the cleaning up instead.
What else are we getting AT BEST beside taking out the trash and gimmicks?
The Kohler rep near me was pretty surprised when someone walked in and offered ridiculous cash for the seat on display. The buyer explained... "There is no way I can impress my guests more than having them realize that even the toilet seat is gold plated." Kohler wound up selling the whole run.
Nothing, perhaps, less than a Humanoid robot that is almost as good as Roomba.
People will pay a crazy amount of money to show off.
everyone that ever tells me that has hardwood or tile floors and a mostly uncluttered house with no doors.
yes: cleaning robots are a solved problem for people with clean uncluttered houses free of long-hair pets or a spouse/etc with a laundry-throwing problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That one doesn't have to do, hence the appeal.
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.
Man makes up stories. Scares himself.
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.
How'd they somehow revive Gene Roddenberry to come and pose with Neo?
I'll be curious if they move those positions to a lower cost-of-living area as they scale up.
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...
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.
How would remote human operators scale, especially for the $20k "ownership" model? I presume the actual hardware probably costs them at least $10k to make, so after about 400 hours of "remote operator use", it's all loss on the company?
I suspect they have a limit on use, or a pay-to-use-remotely thing they neglected to announce.
It's pretty clear that they're still working on the AI training so 'human in the loop' is not part of their long term business model.
Small and medium-sized businesses will start thinking that it's much better to lease a unit for $500/mo. than $2,000/mo. in payroll for one human. Then they own the unit after 3 years. We're going to need some form of UBI soon.
"For 20k$, 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
The total addressable market for giant fighting robots on the other hand...
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.
1. Remote teleop with transfer learning
2. Quiet operation (nobody else is doing this)
3. Pulley based hands
For that price, absolutely
Plus I have epilepsy and live alone so this might just save my life
denysvitali•7h ago
Mind blowing.
leetharris•6h ago
atourgates•6h ago
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•5h ago
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.
jfim•3h ago
tpmoney•5m ago
Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.
A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.
Hamuko•6h ago
xnx•6h ago
lm28469•6h ago
The irony and complete disconnection from the reality of 99% of people is quite mind blowing indeed
vineyardmike•36m ago
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•6h ago
Point being, we might be at an iPhone-like pivotal moment for home robots.
xnx•6h ago