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We’re excited to announce Amy Lentz as our new SVP of People at 1X.

She joins 1X after a distinguished career spanning the Obama White House, Teach For America, and TOMS, where she most recently led organization-wide transformation as Chief People Officer. She has built her career at the intersection of strategy, operations, and human performance, making the case that people strategy is a true competitive advantage, not a cost center.

“Joining 1X feels like the perfect next chapter. The opportunity to help shape a company that is building advanced humanoids with genuine care for human values, safety, and meaningful coexistence is incredibly inspiring. I’m excited to bring my experience to a team that treats people strategy as core to long-term success.” - Amy Lentz

Amy has advised ambitious leadership teams across tech, including Perplexity AI, and has built an audience of over one million professionals through her platform Hack Your HR, where she turns executive behavior into practical, actionable frameworks. Her core thesis, that emotional regulation is your corporate superpower, reflects the kind of thinking that will help 1X continue building a world-class organization.

“Amy’s leadership is exactly what we need as we scale. She brings deep expertise, a sharp strategic mindset, and an unwavering belief that investing in people is how great companies win. At 1X, our people are everything, and Amy’s arrival is a powerful testament to how seriously we take our team as we work to bring NEO to the world.” - Bernt Børnich

Welcoming Amy Lentz as SVP of People

Training humanoid robots requires a large amount of infrastructure behind the scenes — simulation environments, large-scale model training, and powerful onboard compute to handle real-time inference.

At 1X, we use several parts of NVIDIA’s robotics platform throughout our development pipeline, from generating simulated training data to running models directly onboard our robots. With GTC underway this week, it’s a good moment to share a bit more about how these tools fit into our stack.

NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab: Simulation and robot learning

Before a robot learns a new capability in the real world, it often practices thousands or even millions of times in simulation. This allows us to explore new behaviors and generate training data before deploying models on physical robots.

, open-source frameworks for robot simulation and learning, to generate photorealistic environments where our robots can train and evaluate tasks. By training our world models in these physics-based simulation environments, we can run task executions, measure whether a model successfully completes them, and generate additional training data to improve performance.

large numbers of GPU simulations in parallel

 in the cloud. We use this to train reinforcement learning controllers for locomotion and other foundational robot capabilities. Running these simulations at scale exposes the models to far more scenarios than would be possible with physical robots alone.

Cloud Computing: Training models in the cloud

Training embodied AI models requires significant computation.

We use NVIDIA Blackwell HGX B200 GPUs to train our proprietary robot foundation models across both simulated and real-world robot data. These models learn to connect perception with action — interpreting visual scenes and translating them into physical behavior.

Access to large GPU clusters allows us to iterate quickly during both mid-training and post-training stages as we improve robustness and generalization across environments.

NVIDIA Jetson Thor: Running models onboard the robot

Once models are trained, they need to run directly on the robot with minimal latency. Real-world interaction requires fast perception and decision-making while operating within strict power and size constraints– 

 is the only product on the market that is built to support NEO’s requirements for onboard compute.

Thor allows us to run large neural networks locally on the robot itself, supporting real-time perception, reasoning, and control with optimized inference performance.

Running multimodal AI models directly onboard 

 allows the system to respond quickly to its environment while minimizing reliance on external computers.

Vision is one of the primary ways humanoid robots understand the world around them.

As part of our perception stack, we use NVIDIA

Argus to process camera data and support low-latency visual inference. This helps maintain a tight perception-to-action loop when the robot is navigating environments or interacting with objects.

Together, these tools support the full lifecycle of robot learning — from simulation, to large-scale training, to real-world deployment.

Combining this infrastructure with our robotics and AI systems allows us to move efficiently from simulated learning to physical capability as we continue developing NEO and advancing our humanoid robotics platform.

Developing NEO’s AI Using NVIDIA’s  Robotics Platform 

Home robots need common sense behavior and a deep understanding of the physical world.

Many robot foundation models today are vision-language-action models (VLAs), which take a pretrained VLM and add an output head to predict robot actions (

). VLMs benefit from internet-scale knowledge, but are trained on objectives that emphasize visual and semantic understanding over prediction of physical dynamics. Tens of thousands of hours of costly robot data are needed to teach a model how to solve tasks considered simple for a human. Additionally, auxiliary objectives are often used to further coax spatial reasoning of physical interactions (

In this blog, we introduce our video-pretrained world model, 1XWM, integrated into NEO as a robot policy. While VLAs directly predict action trajectories from static image-language input, our world-model based policy derives robot actions from text-conditioned video generation. By leveraging the world dynamics inherent in internet-scale video, our world model generalizes to novel objects, motions, and tasks without pre-training on large-scale robot data or any related teleoperated demonstrations. This represents a shift towards a new regime: allowing robot intelligence to benefit from the scaling of video pretraining, enabled by a hardware stack designed for high fidelity transfer from human embodiment.

Internet video implicitly encodes the structural priors of reality: how people and objects move, where forces are applied, and the implicit constraints of interaction. Accurate translation of video into action comes from more than just a model—it benefits from an embodiment that is kinematically and dynamically congruent with the human form.

The hardware as a first-class citizen in the AI stack closes the human-robot translation gap. By combining embodiment with human-like compliance, interaction dynamics—friction, inertia, and contact behavior—often match human motion closely enough for the model’s learned priors to remain in distribution. What the model can visualize, NEO usually can do.

Today, frontier text-to-video models like 

 generate strikingly realistic videos. However, zero-shot generations from these models are not grounded in robot embodiments and often fall short along key axes required for control:

: Is the rollout consistent with the robot’s camera intrinsics and egocentric viewpoint? Does it preserve depth and the precise spatial relationships required for manipulation?

: Does the robot in the rollout move in ways feasible for the embodiment, respecting morphology, joint limits, velocities, and actuation constraints?

: Does the rollout avoid physically impossible outcomes (e.g. object teleportation) which would not translate to real-world success?

. To bring video knowledge to world model form, we utilize a two-stage grounding process enabled by our integrated stack, following existing works like 

 A text-conditioned diffusion model trained on web-scale video, mid-trained on egocentric human data, and fine-tuned on NEO-specific sensorimotor logs. It predicts the high-fidelity evolution of a scene with strong visual, spatial, and physical accuracy.

 We bridge pixels to actuators by training an IDM to predict the exact action sequence required to transition between the model's generated frames. We use the IDM’s metrics and rejection sampling to enforce kinematic correctness of generations.

At inference time, the system receives a text prompt and a starting frame. The WM rolls out the intended future, the IDM extracts the necessary trajectory, and the robot executes the sequence in the real world.

At test-time, we send a prompt from our frontend to the model inference server, which will then execute the action on-robot.

The 1XWM backbone is built upon a 14B generative video model. To adapt this model to NEO’s embodiment, we use a multi-stage training strategy:

 We train on 900 hours of egocentric human video to align the model with first-person manipulation tasks. At this stage, the model captures general manipulation behaviors but struggles to generate videos of NEO performing tasks.

 We then fine-tune on 70 hours of robot data, which adapts the model to NEO’s visual appearance and kinematics.

 show that the prompt adherence of visual foundation models can be significantly improved by training on descriptive visual captions. However, many egocentric datasets contain only brief task descriptions. To address this, we prompt a VLM to generate more detailed captions to use for training through a 

To select the best 1XWM backbone checkpoint, we use an evaluation metric that compares the 

 distance between the ground truth future action sequence and the actions from our trained IDM run on the generated video. This helps filter for generations that not only look good visually but also yield accurate actions.

Similarly to DreamGen, we use a two-image IDM predictor with a sliding window of W=8 frames for efficient training and inference. However, we use a 

 backbone with a separate flow matching head instead of a single diffusion transformer. Frames at times t and t+W are passed through the depth backbone and the embeddings are used as conditioning for the flow matching head. The IDM is trained on 400 hours of unfiltered robot data including random play data and motions that don’t correspond to any meaningful task. This allows us to faithfully track NEO’s motions anywhere.

At test-time, given the starting frame and a text prompt instructing NEO on what to do, 1XWM rolls out future video frames. We then extract the corresponding robot action trajectory with the IDM, and execute it directly on the robot. To ensure smooth trajectories, the IDM’s outputs are timewise averaged across a batch of initial noise values and sliding windows.

Caption: Our NEO post-training dataset contains primarily high quality pick-and-place data (98.5%), filtered for table top manipulation with hands in view. By leveraging the web-scale pretraining of the base video model, 1XWM can generalize to a wide range of unseen objects, environments, and tasks.

We first seek to understand: what are the limits on task generalization beyond what NEO has already seen and done? How closely does generated video align with real-world execution?

manipulate unseen objects with interesting affordances

perform entirely novel tasks requiring new motions

We observe that 1XWM generated videos generally align well with real-world execution. Generated and post-factual video can look very similar viewed side-by-side, showing 1XWM has strong spatial, kinematic, and physical understanding.

Grasping

New Behaviors


Next, we try tasks requiring two-handed coordination and human interaction—abilities not included in our training dataset. This suggests that such knowledge comes from video pre-training and ego human mid-training. Because NEO’s embodiment is so similar to humans, the affordances learned in human video data translate directly.

Two-Handed

Human Interaction


Sometimes, generations tend to be overly optimistic about task completion and depth understanding. Generated rollouts can look visually plausible while subtly violating real-world constraints (e.g. object consistency, depth, geometry, contact). Our post-training recipe significantly reduces these errors, but monocular pretraining can still lead to weak 3D grounding, where the real robot undershoots or overshoots even when the generated video “succeeds.” This opens future work to integrate depth or stereo for better spatial grounding. 

Beyond anecdotal examples, we show real-world results measuring the performance of 1XWM on in-distribution (ID) and out of distribution (OOD) tasks, running 30 times each. 1XWM succeeds with stable success rates across diverse action primitives, although some dextrous tasks remain challenging (e.g. pouring, drawing).

Can we connect video quality and task success?

If so, we can measure and improve video quality using visual metrics and estimate the likelihood of real-world success. 

Sometimes it is visually obvious whether a generated rollout is likely to succeed. For example, prompting 1XWM with “pull tissue” can occasionally generate videos of NEO picking up the tissue box instead. We’ve generally found close to 0% success rate when executing bad generations. 

 can improve task success. Inspired by this, we try generating multiple rollouts in parallel and executing the best one. We study the “pull tissue” task between one and eight parallel generations, finding that the ability to select the highest quality generation from eight choices does lead to improved task success.

This selection process can be done manually, but is amenable to automation with a VLM evaluator. We leave exploration of best-of-N sampling strategies to future work. For simplicity and disambiguation with our quality of video ranking, all other results in this blog post use a single generation per attempt.

The importance of egocentric data and high-quality captions

Given our hypothesis of correlation between video quality and task success, we visually ablate a few training choices, specifically the impact of upsampling captions and training on egocentric human data.

To evaluate, we generate videos of NEO performing tasks and then ask for human feedback. We use three evaluation datasets, each containing 500 starting image-prompt pairs:

 contains hard tasks and backgrounds in-distribution with our robot training data: mostly pick and place in scenes with clutter and challenging object positions.

 consist of a split across novel tasks: whisk the bowl, pull tissue, relative size object identification (pick bigger object), bimanual manipulation, etc. collected with simple backgrounds in the real world.

 is composed entirely of pick tasks, using seed frames generated by a text-to-image (T2I) model, which randomly samples out-of-distribution household objects and backgrounds.

In-distribution

New Tasks

We ask human annotators to review each generated video and accept or reject it based on physical plausibility, task completion, and consistency with NEO’s embodiment and capabilities.


We find that upsampling captions improves video generation quality on every evaluation split. Upsampled captions better match the detailed text conditioning used during video-model pretraining and also provide clearer conditioning for task-specific motion.

Adding egocentric human data improves generation quality on both 

 splits. This is consistent with our hypothesis that ego human data contributes a transferable prior for manipulation that maps well onto NEO’s humanoid embodiment. For in-distribution tasks for which we have good NEO data coverage, egocentric data may dilute the post-training mix and cause a neutral or negative change in visual score.


Finally, we run real-world ablations on egocentric mid-training and caption upsampling, techniques we found to improve visual generation quality. For each task, we run all models 30 times in the same setting, on the same robot, and without test-time filtering. We do not control further with blind evaluation or checkpoint selection.

, we find that all models perform similarly, suggesting that in-distribution tasks are least sensitive to changes in data or caption.

 task was the most challenging across models. Models without either the egocentric human midtraining phase or caption upsampling incorrectly interpret the instruction. We find that our model with both is the only model to achieve a nonzero success rate.

As a whole, we do see a connection where including changes that impact visual model quality improve task success in real-world experiments.

Ego human data

Only NEO data

NEO + ego human data

1XWM transfers the knowledge of web-scale video data to imagine and then execute diverse tasks on NEO. From here, we’re excited to improve 1XWM to solve more complex, longer-horizon tasks required for useful household autonomy.

Building on the rapid progress observed in generative video models and equipped with data from our NEO production ramp, we will continue scaling 1XWM to improve quality and task success. Today, the 1XWM backbone takes 11 seconds to run, using multi-gpu inference built in collaboration with our friends at Verda (Antonio and Aditya). Each inference generates 5 seconds of real-time video, and the IDM takes 1 second to extract actions from the generated rollout. To solve reactive tasks and contact-rich manipulation, faster inference will improve reaction time, or latency between prompt and action execution. As we consider tasks longer than 5 seconds, closed-loop replanning with memory context will help us handle drift, partial observability, and recovery.

We don’t need perfect performance across the board to make deep progress. Nonzero success across a broad set of tasks provides the lever to unlock self-improvement.

1XWM creates a flywheel where exploration, evaluation, and policy refinement are driven by NEO’s own experience, rather than being limited by expert demonstrations. When learning is driven by experience, NEO can only improve from here, and we are excited to build a future where NEO can teach itself to master any task in any home.

If this sounds motivating to you, come help us build the future: 

https://1x.recruitee.com/o/ai-research-engineer-world-models

1X World Model | From Video to Action: A New Way Robots Learn

1X is excited to announce that Mohi Khansari has been appointed Head of Robot Learning, expanding his role after more than a year as Distinguished AI Engineer at the company.

Mohi is a veteran roboticist with over two decades of experience in robot learning & autonomy and control. He has been the chief architect behind Redwood AI, 1X’s in-house vision-language transformer powering end-to-end mobile manipulation in NEO, and his work has been central to advancing NEO’s real-world perception, learning, and manipulation capabilities.

Prior to 1X, Mohi was a founding member and lead of the imitation learning effort at Everyday Robots, a Google X moonshot focused on bringing embodied AI into human environments. He later served as a key technical lead at Cruise, advancing the intersection of motion planning and deep robot learning for large-scale autonomous systems.

Mohi holds a PhD in Robotics from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and completed a postdoctoral appointment at the Stanford AI Lab, where his research focused on robot learning and control.

“Joining 1X has been an incredible opportunity to move humanoid robotics beyond 'impressive research demos' and into technology that delivers real value for people. 1X’s humanoid robot, NEO, is the kind of platform this moment has been waiting for—engineered for safe, capable interaction around people, with the strength and dexterity to do useful work. I’m excited to lead Robot Learning at 1X, and build the intelligence that enables NEO to help people in their daily lives with my team.” -Mohi Khansari

As Head of Robot Learning, Mohi will lead efforts to advance learning systems that bridge research and deployment, accelerating 1X’s mission to deliver safe, general-purpose humanoid robots.

“Mohi is one of those rare builders who has contributed key academic innovations in the field and can still ship. He’s spent twenty years turning learning and control into working robots—not papers, not prototypes, but real capability. Putting him in this role strengthens the bridge between our research ambition and what NEO can do in the world.” - Bernt Børnich, Founder & CEO.

1X Appoints Mohi Khansari as Head of Robot Learning

Palo Alto, CA, October 28, 2025 – 1X is proud to announce the launch of NEO, the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home. NEO automates everyday chores and offers personalized assistance so people can spend more time on the things that matter.

With intuitive, user-friendly features and a revolutionary hardware platform, NEO is the safest, most affordable, and most capable humanoid on earth. NEO brings the science-fiction idea of robots from the movie screen into reality — creating space for us to enjoy our time at home, instead of coming home just to do more work.

"Humanoids were long a thing of sci-fi... then they were a thing of research, but today — with the launch of NEO — humanoid robots become a product. Something that you and me can reach out and touch. NEO closes the gap between our imaginations and the world we live in, to the point where we can actually ask a humanoid robot for help, and help is granted."

- Bernt Børnich, CEO and Founder, 1X

The Chores feature allows owners to give NEO a list of tasks to complete around the home, schedule a time for when they want them completed, and come back to a cleaner space every day. NEO can also handle chores in real time while you relax or work nearby. With the click of a button or a simple verbal command, NEO transforms into a personal housekeeper; tackling tasks like folding laundry, organizing shelves, and tidying spaces. For any chore that NEO doesn't yet know, owners can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it through unknown tasks — helping NEO learn while getting the job done.


NEO is built to engage naturally while providing help and utility through conversation. With a built-in large language model (LLM), NEO gives owners instant access to knowledge and personalized assistance without relying on devices with screens.

Its Audio Intelligence allows NEO to recognize when it is being addressed, ensuring it listens and responds only when appropriate. Visual Intelligence adds contextual awareness — letting NEO use what it sees to enhance interactions, like recognizing ingredients on a kitchen counter and suggesting dishes to make. Memory enables continuity across conversations, allowing NEO to recall past context and adapt its responses over time. From scheduling appointments and setting reminders for birthdays to keeping grocery lists and tracking progress in language lessons, not only does NEO free up time, but also valuable mental space.

NEO Operates Autonomously and Learns New Skills Over Time

The core of the NEO experience is driven by AI. Each NEO will be able to have conversations, and navigate around the home to provide help where needed. NEO will arrive to early owners with the ability to handle basic tasks, and with continued use, learn and develop new skills. From the first day, NEO performs functions like opening doors for guests, fetching items, and turning off the lights at night — and grows in abilities with every software update. Leveraging 1X’s AI model, which is trained on real-world data, NEO is able to adapt to the world’s most diverse environment: the home.

At the core of the NEO experience is a revolutionary hardware platform that succeeds 1X’s prior models (NEO Gamma and NEO Beta). NEO is built with 1X’s patented Tendon Drive that uses the highest-torque density motors on earth to drive its tendon-based transmissions. This one-of-a-kind actuation system creates gentle movements that make NEO uniquely safe and compliant around people.

NEO represents a generational leap in humanoid hardware with the addition of Human Level Dexterity (22 DoF Hands) and a head-to-toe soft body made of custom 3D lattice polymer structures. At just 66 pounds (29.94 kg), NEO is capable of lifting over 150 pounds (68 kg) and carrying 55 pounds (24.95kg), and has a noise level of 22dB — making it more silent than a modern day refrigerator. Additionally, NEO possesses built-in communication with WiFi, Bluetooth, and 5G as well as a three-stage speaker in the pelvis and chest area, giving owners a built-in mobile home entertainment system.

NEO is approachable and comfortable to be around. NEO’s essentialist design aims to complement living spaces rather than disrupt them – with organic neutral tones, and a soft knit suit and shoes.

NEO is now available for pre-order, with first orders shipping to consumer homes in 2026.

NEO is now available via 1X’s online store [

] and comes in three distinct colors (Tan, Gray, Dark Brown). Customers interested owning one of the first NEOs can purchase Early Access for $20,000, which includes priority delivery in 2026. There is also a subscription model offering of $499/month which will be shipped at a later date.

1X will start delivering NEOs primarily in the U.S in 2026 and expand to other markets starting in 2027.

To the community that supports us and the team here at 1X that works tirelessly to build a better future, we can’t thank you enough. Another special thanks to Eli Russell Linnetz for capturing NEO for this campaign.

NEO Home Robot | Order Today

We're excited to announce Vikram Kothari as our new VP of Operations.

He joins the 1X team after over eight years at SpaceX leading Dragon, Starship, Raptor, and Launch Avionics supply chain orgs. Preceding his time at SpaceX he was a Director at Microsoft, where he also led hardware supply chain for almost a decade.

“Joining 1X Technologies has been an inspiring step for me. The company’s commitment to building safe, privacy-first humanoids that are designed to coexist meaningfully with humans sets it apart in the robotics space. The team’s depth of talent and shared sense of purpose create an environment that’s both ambitious and grounded. I’m excited to contribute to a mission that places human values at the center of innovation." -Vikram Kothari.

Vikram's tenure at SpaceX streamlined operations and powered historic milestones, including the development of Starship and Starlink’s global expansion-- his expertise in scaling complex supply chains will serve as an even greater accelerant to 1X’s mission to deploy humanoids into homes.

“Vikram joining the team is a game-changer. Manufacturing has yet to find its heroes—but as we bring NEO into the world, Vik’s impact on the re-industrialization of America and the future of humanoids will be a defining part of the story.” -Bernt Bornich

Welcoming Vikram Kothari as VP of Operations

We're excited to announce our new HQ in Palo Alto, California.

The 80,000 sq. foot facility will seat 400 people, with employees from the company's previous offices migrating to the new space over the course of summer 2025.

Our leadership is confident that by positioning the team at the global center of AI and robotics, 1X will be able to attract top talent and foster even closer collaboration with our partners and investors.

As we grow, consolidating our Sunnyvale [CA] and Moss [Norway] team under one roof will accelerate our speed to ramping production and getting NEO into homes near you.

Welcoming Amy Lentz as SVP of People

Developing NEO’s AI Using NVIDIA’s Robotics Platform

1X World Model | From Video to Action: A New Way Robots Learn

Stories

1X & NVIDIA Research Collaboration

1X Acquires Kind Humanoid

Cooking With NEO Beta and Nick DiGiovanni

Podcast: 1X CEO, Bernt Børnich on the Venture Europe Podcast

NEO Featured in NVIDIA GTC Keynote

NEO Home Robot | Order Today

Company

Welcoming Amy Lentz as SVP of People

1X Appoints Mohi Khansari as Head of Robot Learning

Welcoming Vikram Kothari as VP of Operations

Opening our new HQ in Palo Alto

Welcoming Mustally Hussain as CFO

ExperienceNEO