On a recent morning, I knocked on the front door of a handsome two-story home in Redwood City, Calif. Within seconds, the door was opened by a faceless robot dressed in a beige bodysuit that clung tight to its trim waist and long legs.
This svelte humanoid greeted me with what seemed to be a Scandinavian accent, and I offered to shake hands. As our palms met, it said: “I have a firm grip.”
When the home’s owner, a Norwegian engineer named Bernt Børnich, asked for some bottled water, the robot turned, walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator with one hand.
Artificial intelligence is already driving cars, writing essays and even writing computer code. Now, humanoids, machines built to look like humans and powered by A.I., are poised to move into our homes so they can help with the daily chores. Mr. Børnich is chief executive and founder of a start-up called 1X. Before the end of the year, his company hopes to put his robot, Neo, into more than 100 homes in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
His start-up is among the dozens of companies planning to sell humanoids and get them into both homes and businesses. Investors have poured $7.2 billion into more than 50 start-ups since 2015, according to PitchBook, a research firm that tracks the tech industry. The humanoid frenzy reached a new peak last year, when investments topped $1.6 billion. And that did not include the billions that Elon Musk and Tesla, his electric car company, are pumping into Optimus, a humanoid they began building in 2021.
Entrepreneurs like Mr. Børnich and Mr. Musk believe humanoids will one day do much of the physical work that is now handled by people, including household chores like wiping counters and emptying dishwashers, warehouse jobs like sorting packages and factory labor like building cars on an assembly line.
Simpler robots — small robotic arms and autonomous carts, for instance — have long shared the workload inside warehouses and factories. Now, companies are betting that machines can tackle a wider range of tasks by mimicking the ways that people walk, bend, twist, reach, grip and generally get things done.
Because homes, offices and warehouses are already built for humans, these companies argue, humanoids are better equipped to navigate the world than any other robot.
The push toward humanoid labor has been building for years, fueled by advances in both robotic hardware and A.I. technologies that allow robots to rapidly learn new skills. But these humanoids are still a bit of a mirage.
Internet videos have circulated for years showing the remarkable dexterity of these machines, but very often, they are remotely guided by humans. And simple tasks like loading the dishwasher are anything but simple for them.
“There are many videos out there that give a false impression of these robots,” said Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Though they look like humans, they aren’t always behaving like humans.”
Neo said “Hello” with a Scandinavian accent because it was operated by a Norwegian technician in the basement of Mr. Børnich’s home. (Ultimately, the company wants to build call centers where perhaps dozens of technicians would support robots.)
The robot walked through the dining room and kitchen on its own. But the technician spoke for Neo and remotely guided its hands via a virtual reality headset and two wireless joysticks. Robots are still learning to navigate the world on their own. And they need a lot of help doing it. At least, for now.
‘I saw a level of hardware that I did not think was possible.’
I first visited 1X’s offices in Silicon Valley nearly a year ago. When a robot named Eve entered the room, opening and closing the door, I could not shake the feeling that this wide-eyed robot was really a person in costume.
Eve moved on wheels, not legs. And yet, it still felt human. I thought of “Sleeper,” the 1973 Woody Allen sci-fi comedy filled with robotic butlers.
The company’s engineers had already built Neo, but it hadn’t learned to walk. An early version hung on the wall of the company’s lab.
In 2022, Mr. Børnich logged onto a Zoom call with an A.I. researcher named Eric Jang. They had never met.
Mr. Jang, now 30, worked in a robotics lab at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, and Mr. Børnich, now 42, ran a start-up in Norway called Halodi Robotics.
A would-be investor had asked Mr. Jang to gather some information on Halodi, to see if it was worth an investment. Mr. Børnich showed off the company’s humanoid, Eve. It was something he had dreamed of building since he was a teenager, inspired — like many roboticists — by science fiction (his personal favorite: the 1982 movie “Blade Runner”).
Mr. Jang was entranced by the way that Eve moved. He compared the Zoom call to a scene in the sci-fi television drama “Westworld” in which a man attends a cocktail party and is shocked to learn that everyone in the room is a robot.
“I saw a level of hardware that I did not think was possible,” Mr. Jang said.
The would-be investor did not invest in Halodi. But Mr. Jang soon convinced Mr. Børnich to join forces.
Mr. Jang was part of a Google team teaching robots new skills using mathematical systems called neural networks, which allow robots to learn from data that depicts real-world tasks. After seeing Eve, Mr. Jang told Mr. Børnich they should apply the same technique to humanoids.
The result was a cross-Atlantic company they renamed 1X. The start-up, which has grown to around 200 employees, is now backed by over $125 million in funding from investors that include Tiger Global and the artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI.
‘All of this is learned behavior.’
When I returned to the company’s lab about six months after meeting Eve, I was greeted by a walking Neo. They had taught it to walk entirely in the digital world. By simulating the physics of the real world in a video-game-like environment, they could train a digital version of their robot to stand and balance and, eventually, take steps.
After months spent training this digital robot, they transferred everything it had learned to a physical humanoid.
If I stepped into Neo’s path, it would stop and move around me. If I pushed its chest, it stayed on its feet. Sometimes, it stumbled or did not quite know what to do. But it could walk around a room much like people do.
“All of this is learned behavior,” Mr. Jang said, as Neo clicked against the floor with each step. “If we put it into any environment, it should know how to do this.”
Training a robot to do household chores, however, is an entirely different prospect.
Because the physics of loading a dishwasher or folding laundry are exceedingly complex, 1X cannot teach these tasks in the virtual world. They have to gather data inside real homes.
When I visited Mr. Børnich’s home a month later, Neo started to struggle with the refrigerator’s stainless-steel door. The robot’s Wi-Fi connection had dropped. But once the hidden technician rebooted the Wi-Fi, he seamlessly guided the robot through its small task. Neo handed me a bottled water.
I also watched Neo load a washing machine, squatting gingerly to lift clothes from a laundry basket. And as Mr. Børnich and I chatted outside the kitchen, the robot started wiping the counters. All this was done via remote control.
Even when controlled by humans, Neo might drop a cup or struggle to find the right angle as it tries to toss an empty bottle into a garbage can under a sink. Though humanoids have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, they are still not as nimble as humans. Neo, for instance, cannot raise its arms above its head.
For the uninitiated, Neo can also feel a little creepy, like anything else that seems partly human and partly not. Talking to it is particularly strange, given that you are really talking to a remote technician. It’s like talking to a ventriloquist’s dummy.
‘What we are selling is more of a journey than a destination.’
By guiding Neo through households chores, Mr. Børnich and his team can gather data — using cameras and other sensors installed on the robot itself — that show how these tasks are done. Then 1X engineers can use this data to expand and improve Neo’s skills.
Just as ChatGPT can learn to write term papers by analyzing text culled from the internet, a robot can learn to clean windows by pinpointing patterns in hours of digital video.
Most humanoid efforts, including Mr. Musk’s Optimus and similar projects like Apptronik and Figure AI, are designing humanoids for warehouses and factories, arguing that these tightly controlled environments will be easier for robots to navigate. But through selling humanoids into homes, 1X hopes to gather enormous amounts of data that can ultimately show these robots how to handle the chaos of daily life.
First, the company must find people who will welcome an early version of a strange new technology into their homes — and pay for it.
1X has not yet set a price for these machines, which it manufactures inside its own factory in Norway. Building a humanoid like Neo costs about as much as building a small car — tens of thousands of dollars.
To reach its potential, Neo must capture video of what happens inside homes. In some cases, technicians will see what happens in real time. Fundamentally, this is a robot that learns on the job.
“What we are selling is more of a journey than a destination,” Mr. Børnich said. “It is going to be a really bumpy road, but Neo will do things that are truly useful.”
‘We want you to give us your data on your terms.’
When I asked Mr. Børnich how the company would handle privacy once the humanoids were inside customers’ homes, he explained that technicians, working from remote call centers, would only take control of the robot if they received approval from the owner via a smartphone app.
He also said that data would not be used to train new systems until at least 24 hours after it was gathered. That would allow 1X to delete any videos that customers do not want the company to use.
“We want you to give us your data on your terms,” Mr. Børnich said.
Using this data, Mr. Børnich hopes to produce a humanoid that can do almost any household chore. That means Neo could potentially replace workers who make their living cleaning homes.
But that is still years away — at best. And because of growing shortage of workers who handle both house cleaning and care of elders and children, organizations that represent these workers welcome the rise of new technologies that do work in the home — provided that companies like 1X build robots that work well alongside human workers.
“These tools could make some of the more strenuous, taxing and dangerous work easier — and allow workers to focus on things that only human workers can offer,” said Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents the country’s house cleaners, home-care workers and nannies.
Soon, Neo began cleaning the towering windows on the side of the house. Then, as I turned back to Mr. Børnich, I heard a crash on the kitchen floor. After an electrical malfunction, Neo had fallen over backward — fainting dead away.
Mr. Børnich picked the robot up, like it was small teenager, carried it into the living room and laid it down on a chair. Even when Neo passed out, it looked human.
Other humanoids I’ve met can be intimidating. Neo, less than five and half feet tall and a 66 pounds, is not. But I still wondered if it could injure a pet — or a child — with a fall like that.
Will people let this machine into their homes? How quickly will its skills improve? Can it free people from their daily chores? These questions cannot yet be answered. But Mr. Børnich is pressing forward.
“There are a lot of people like me,” he said. “They’ve dreamed of having something like this in their home since they were a kid.”