The Problem with this Humanoid Robot

(upbeat music) - Okay.

We have to have a conversation about this.

I feel like it's been a minute since I've done just an old school

straight to camera rant video,

but this has been all over my timeline lately,

so I feel like I have to.

So meet NEO, potentially, the most futuristic product we've ever seen.

This thing is a full-fledged humanoid robot, 5'6", 66 pounds,

four-hour battery life, self-charging, and it lives in your house.

It's finally here.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

It's for doing chores.

It's a housekeeper.

It has the same dexterity

as a human because it's shaped just like a human,

walks around on two legs, has 10 fingers.

It can fold laundry and put it away for you,

or it can do the dishes for you from start to finish,

and then put everything away.

It can go around and water the plants outside or inside,

on a perfect schedule, and it never forgets a single plant.

And then it'll go around

and vacuum and tidy up the house

if anything gets left out.

It always knows where everything is.

It can find the TV remote,

and it'll basically actively do all the chores

that you know you have to do

but you don't actually want to do.

And when it's done,

it goes back to its little docking spot and charges itself.

Imagine going out for the day of work

and coming back a few hours later,

and everything's done.

All the chores are finished every single time every day.

You never have to do chores again.

That's amazing.

Or maybe let's say you have mobility issues,

this thing can sort of act

as a personal assistant in a lot of ways.

These are things that represent massive value for a lot of people,

and it's available to order...

Now?

This is available to order?

This feels like it could be the best tech announcement of all time,

in 2025, except this isn't real.

And I mean that in the most literal way possible.

This is not real.

First of all, it's a pre-order.

So you can go to this website right now

and you can pick between three colors,

and then it's either 500 bucks a month subscription for a standard delivery,

or you can pay a flat $20,000 to own it outright

and get priority delivery.

Just drop a $200 fully refundable deposit to get in line today,

and deliveries in the US start sometime next year, and that's just allegedly.

We don't know when it's actually gonna ship.

Now, to be clear,

it's not actually the price that I have a big problem with.

I know these numbers seem eye popping on paper,

but this is a first generation bleeding edge humanoid robot assistant.

Like I never thought that this would be cheap.

And also there isn't really competition yet.

So you gotta imagine the target audience is gonna be people whose time is

worth more than the money they're spending on it.

This is for people who the idea of saving a few hours on chores

every week so that they can use

that time to make more money actually makes logical sense.

People really think like that.

It's for early adopters.

It's for people who wanna spend however much they think it's worth on this

brand new novel thing.

That's fine.

But my issue with this product is the gap between what it's actually capable

of today and what they're promising

as they take your money today.

I think when people watch a video like this,

they expect that this robot has some sort of built-in artificial intelligence

that allows it to recognize objects

and navigate around on its own,

and learn your house, and be productive for those hours while you're gone.

And that I think would be a reasonable thing to get out of watching

that video because that's what it's designed to show.

That's what you're supposed to feel.

That's the dream.

But that's not actually what's happening.

So Joanna Stern, the legend, she did a video with this NEO robot,

also this week, where the company showed her all the things

that it could do.

And turns out, 100% of the things

that they showed her were remotely controlled by a human in another room wearing

a VR headset with controllers.

That's not exaggerating. 100% of the stuff they showed her, the carrying things around,

the loading up the dishwasher.

I mean, look at this thing. (gentle music) Yeah, all of this is teleoperated,

and this was a demo set up by this 1X company.

So this is like best case scenario stuff.

And I see a lot of people defending this robot online, like, "Oh,

there's probably other things that it can do autonomously.

They just didn't show her yet."

Really?

you don't think they would show her the best stuff

that this could do autonomously to keep selling the dream?

If you watch that keynote video back, to their credit,

you'll notice that they actually are very careful to label exactly

when the robot is doing something autonomously

and not teleoperated.

And in that whole nearly 10-minute video,

there's exactly two scenes that have this label.

There's the get the door command. - Can you get the door,

please? - Where the robot walks over to the door because someone's coming up.

It grabs the handle, waits for the guest,

and then sort of pulls the door open and fumbles backwards a little bit,

kinda like a toddler, to let them inside.

And then there's the put away the dishes command where the robot toddles over

to the person recognizes the harmless not glass empty cup in its hand,

grabs it, and then walks away with it.

Cool.

No, seriously, that's actually pretty impressive.

Even if I could already today unlock the door with my Google Home

and a smart lock,

which is my voice,

there is something at least a little bit futuristic about a humanoid robot going

to do that.

That's part of the dream.

It's doing it autonomously.

But then that also means

that everything else happening in this video

and everything else we've ever seen this NEO robot do,

we can safely assume is remote controlled.

So the gap between what this product can actually do today

and what it can maybe hopefully do someday in the ideal future,

it is massive.

They're massively far apart.

And so that's really my main issue.

There seems to be a bit of a lost art in waiting for a

tech product to be actually finished before announcing

and unveiling it.

Do you remember when tech companies would unveil a brand new tech product

that they'd been working on,

and then do a demo.

And then the next slide was like this thing is going on sale tomorrow,

or next week, or something like that.

And that hype would carry right into the buying cycle.

You remember that?

That was sick.

But now, in this age of all these AI products,

it's like there's this thing where you end up selling the dream before you

sell the actual product.

And that is dangerous.

The promise of AI is so huge, and so massive, and magnificent, and awesome,

but is also so clearly not done yet

that you end up with stuff like the Humane Pin,

or even the Rabbit r1 for example,

or heck even Apple Intelligence where you have these big promises,

but the capabilities are still over here

while the promise is all the way over here.

And I'm trying to figure out why they do that.

And I think really there's two main reasons, and believe it or not,

I think Tesla self-driving is a really perfect parallel example for a lot of

this stuff.

See, basically, in order for this robot to be everything people want it to

be,

they need to develop a super smart AI system

that looks through the robot sensors

and is able to learn its environment

and recognize everything it's looking at

and teach itself to navigate

that environment and perform tasks.

It has to learn what a laundry room is

and what the laundry looks like

and how to fold each type of clothing,

and it needs to learn what cups, and forks, and glasses are,

and how to pick them up.

And it has to be adaptable to all these different sizes, and shapes,

and materials, and things of all these household objects.

So that when the user asks for it to do something, just like, "Hey,

NEO, vacuum the living room when I'm gone," or something like that,

then NEO can go, "Okay, I know where the living room is.

I know where the vacuum is.

I know how to use the vacuum, where the handle's at,

how much battery life I have,

how much I need to vacuum the whole living room.

I know not to knock over lamps or certain objects in there."

And even the laundry folding thing,

just that requires a ton of training data

or at least some way to understand all these different shapes of shirts,

and jackets, and hoods, and vests, and all sorts of things, and hooks,

and hangers, and what gets folded, what gets dry cleaned, all these different things.

And the list just goes on and on.

And like, what if one of the tasks is going

and getting the right medication for an elderly person,

bringing it to them?

It has to get that right.

It needs to identify the correct medication at the right time

and the right intervals,

and bringing it to them.

That is one of a ton of household objects

that it has to specifically get really good at.

Now, in the self-driving car world, no matter what you think of them,

Tesla's definitely a leader here,

and they've had a pretty clever approach to trying to work on this problem.

Because their problem is their robots on wheels need to learn all these possible

variations and ways to navigate situations

that could happen on the road,

and how to get around them, traffic cones,, construction zones, weird lane markings,

et cetera, et cetera.

So, with their millions of cars already on the road, they have slowly,

very slowly let people turn on this beta self-driving feature in small stages in

their cars while instructing people to keep their hands on their wheel,

of course, so that they can slowly start to gather information from people willing

to beta test.

And so those cars will encounter

and navigate all sorts of situations for the first time,

and then the second time, and then the fifth time,

and then the 100th time.

And all this data can go back into the system to help all these

cars learn and get better.

And now at this point, this is their primary advantage,

is they have millions

and millions of miles of training data from people essentially beta testing for Tesla.

It's a robotics challenge, it's an AI challenge, but yeah,

they're essentially using early adopters to beta test to make the systems better for

the eventual masses.

And now, this home AI robot challenge is essentially the same thing,

but in people's homes, which is potentially way more variables.

Cars have to stick to what's on the road

and mostly are operating in a 2D plane,

while there's obviously different...

People's houses are crazy different shapes, and there's all sorts of objects,

and different shapes and types of them

and a million different variables just with household objects.

And maybe you could argue

that the stakes of self-driving cars are a little higher

because of all the safety risks.

And if it messes up, someone could die.

Maybe that doesn't happen as often with the home AI robot, but then again,

if it gets someone's medication wrong, it's still pretty important.

So, I think the point here is you don't get to make this awesome

perfect home robot without all of this information.

And so they need the training data

and so they go right back to early adopters.

So people who press that order now button first and who actually, I guess,

get one of these when they start to ship them,

will get a robot that can probably do a few simple things autonomously,

like opening doors, but there will be many things it can't do.

And for that, if you scroll down on their website,

you can see there's expert mode,

which is when you have something the robot can't yet do

and you schedule one of their teleoperating employees to look through the sensors into

your home and do the task

so that the robot can learn from it.

And this is something

that they've pretty directly said

that they expect early adopters to be totally cool with.

Go watch Joanna's video, I'll link it below the like button.

She basically grills the CEO about all this stuff,

and he's kind of just like, "Yeah,

if you wanna be on the bleeding edge of this...

We'll probably blur faces and maybe let you geofence certain areas of your house,

but yeah, that'll be one of the things that they allow you to do."

So, look, there are certain industries where pre-ordering something that's not finished yet is

actually normal behavior.

This happens all the time with smartphones now.

This happens in video games, even happens a bit with cars these days,

although sometimes that can even go too far.

But now with all these AI products coming out now,

it's resulted so many more times in this strategy.

They feel like they have to announce the product way before it's done,

and they end up putting out this thing

that is just nowhere near the dream.

And that's how you get...

We talked about the Humane Pin.

Doesn't that sound familiar?

Getting announced with such a high potential ceiling

and promising that this could maybe be a post-smartphone world type of gadget,

but it was just absolutely not good when it came out,

and not enough people were willing to beta test something with

that miserable of an experience.

And then the Rabbit r1, like I said, that's another one.

They are surviving and they're improving, but absolutely with those early adopters.

But a $20,000 5'6" humanoid that wanders around your house and does chores,

are there really that many people you think

that are willing to spend

that amount of money

and know that they're gonna have to potentially give up some pretty serious privacy

and are basically going to be a beta tester for some unknown number of

years to hopefully maybe someday achieve

that dream?

Some of those people are out there, but is there enough of those people?

I don't know.

I clearly don't know, and I think a lot of other people don't know.

There are obviously a lot of potential downsides to this robot.

It's too small and weak to carry anything super heavy.

It's also too slow and a bit too clumsy, it looks like,

to do anything really serious.

And it requires inviting a ton of remote viewable cameras

and microphones into your house,

and it could also fall over and have a hard time getting up.

And also, just like the self-driving car,

there are a number of situations where the robot getting enough things wrong could

be dangerous.

Even just the medication stuff that I talked about earlier,

or even it just clumsily dropping something made of glass,

or any other various potentially dangerous household situations.

And also, I'm not even sure it has to be human shaped,

but that's another argument for another video.

But the upside clearly is the dream.

Like Rosie the Robot from "The Jetsons" type of dream,

a personal assistant that seamlessly goes around your house

and quietly does all the stuff

that you don't wanna do

and does it better

and faster as time goes on,

and does it in quiet hours of the night.

The point is this is the new AI promise problem that we have.

It's not just this product and this company.

This is the most visible one on all our timelines right now.

But it's like all these AI products are promising the world way,

way before they have a product that's ready to actually show anyone

and take money for it.

And theoretically, this is what we want AI to do.

It's not just like AI-generated videos and slop and random copyright infringement.

We want it to be doing actually useful, productive stuff.

That's not the issue.

It's just the gap.

The gap, that's the issue.

And closing that gap is so, so hard.

And this is one of the obvious examples.

The people that would benefit most from the ideal version of this robot,

like the elderly or people with disabilities,

are the least likely to become early adopters.

So it's tough.

I can actually applaud them for showing everything

that they did to Joanna in

that video.

Fun fact, they actually reached out to me 10 months ago in January from

a random Gmail address offering to do a sponsored video.

I didn't respond.

I didn't think it was anywhere close to real

or worth doing a video

or talking about,

but we'll see how this ages.

We might look back at this in 12 months,

and everyone everywhere shipping great AI products and humanoid robots,

and it's all a dream, and I look like an idiot, in which case,

great, we made it through that gap somehow.

But history seems to be suggesting that I'll probably be right about this one,

at least for now.

But, hey, subscribe to see me in my words if I'm wrong.

Thanks for watching.

Catch you in the next one.

Peace. (gentle music)