Research

We see World Models as a grand challenge in robotics. They have the potential to solve general purpose simulation and evaluation, enabling robots that are safe, reliable, and intelligent.

 work on our robot world model which imagines possible futures given action proposals. We also announced our first challenge: compression, which focuses on minimizing training loss across a diverse robot dataset. The lower the loss, the better the model understands the training data. This challenge is still active, offering a $10k prize to the first submission that achieves a loss of 8.0 on our private test set. Our Github repo provides code and pretrained 

Today, we are announcing the next phase of the World Model Challenge: Sampling.

Sampling focuses on generating realistic future outcomes in video sequences by predicting the next frame given a sequence of prior frames. The goal is to produce coherent and plausible continuations of the video, accurately reflecting the dynamics of the scene. We encourage you to explore a variety of future prediction methods beyond traditional next-logit prediction. Techniques such as Generative Adversarial Networks, Diffusion Models, and MaskGIT are all welcome for generating the next frame. To be competitive, submissions should achieve a PSNR of around 26.5 or above. We will open our evaluation server for submissions and release our metric in March 2025.

To help accelerate research in this direction, we’re 

 of 100 hours of raw robot video alongside our robot state sequences which enable world model training. Our raw videos will be shared under the 

 license, and we will continue to share tokenized datasets under 

We’re also thrilled to announce that we’re partnering with NVIDIA’s World Models team to further tokenize our video sequences with their newly-announced 

. NVIDIA’s work in visual tokenization and quantization creates highly compressed, temporal representations of our robot data, optimized for such research. The Cosmos-tokenized dataset can be found 

On the horizon is our third challenge, Evaluation. This is our ultimate goal: can you predict how well a robot will perform before testing it in the real world? This challenge aims to assess the ability to evaluate and rank different robot policies using a world model, without the need for physical deployment.

The official details for the evaluation challenge have not been released yet—stay tuned for the announcement.

 - starter code, evals, baseline implementations


1X World Model: Sampling Challenge Update

 is a computer program that can imagine how the world evolves in response to an agent’s behavior. Building on advancements in 

, we have trained a world model that serves as a virtual simulator for our robots.

From the same starting image sequence, our world model can imagine multiple futures from different robot action proposals.

It can also predict non-trivial object interactions like rigid bodies, effects of dropping objects, partial observability, deformable objects (curtains, laundry), and articulated objects (doors, drawers, curtains, chairs).

In this post we’ll share why world models for robots are important, the capabilities and limitations of our current models, and a new dataset and public competition to encourage more research in this direction.

World models solve a very practical and yet often overlooked challenge when building general-purpose robots: evaluation. If you train a robot to perform 1000 unique tasks, it is very hard to know whether a new model has made the robot better at all 1000 tasks, compared to a prior model. Even the same model weights can experience a rapid degradation in performance in a matter of days due to subtle changes in the environment background or ambient lighting.

If the environment keeps changing over time, then old experiments performed in that environment are no longer reproducible because the old environment no longer exists! This problem gets worse if you are evaluating multi-task systems in a constantly-changing setting like the home or the office. This makes careful robotic science in the real world frustratingly hard.

Careful measurement of capabilities allows one to predict how capabilities will scale when one increases data, compute, and model size – these “

” defend the enormous investment that goes into general-purpose AI systems like ChatGPT. If robotics is to have its “ChatGPT moment”, we must first establish its “Scaling Laws”.

Physics-based simulation (Bullet, Mujoco, Isaac Sim, Drake) are a reasonable way to quickly test robot policies. They are resettable and reproducible, allowing researchers to carefully compare different control algorithms. However, these simulators are mostly designed for rigid body dynamics and require a lot of manual asset authoring. How to simulate robot hands opening a cardboard box of coffee filters, cutting fruit with a knife, unscrewing a frozen jar of preserves, or interacting with other intelligent agents like humans? Everyday objects and animals encountered in home environments are notoriously difficult to simulate, so simulation environments used in robotics tend to be visually sterile and lack the diversity of the real world use case. Small-scale evaluation on a limited number of tasks in real or sim is not predictive of large-scale evaluation in the real world.

We’re taking a radically new approach to evaluation of general-purpose robots: learning a simulator directly from raw sensor data and using it to evaluate our policies across millions of scenarios. By learning a simulator directly from real data, you can absorb the full complexity of the real world without manual asset creation.

Over the last year, we’ve gathered thousands of hours of data on EVE humanoids doing diverse mobile manipulation tasks in homes and offices and interacting with people. We combined the video and action data to train a world model that can anticipate future video from observations and actions.

Our world model is capable of generating diverse outcomes based on different action commands. Below we show various generations conditioning the world model on four different trajectories, each of which start from the same initial frames. As before, the examples shown are not included during training.

The main value of the world model comes from simulating object interactions. In the following generations, we provide the model the same initial frames and three different sets of actions to grasp boxes. In each scenario, the box(es) grasped are lifted and moved in accordance with the motion of the gripper, while the other boxes remain undisturbed.

We can also generate long-horizon videos. The example below simulates a complete t-shirt folding demonstration. T-shirts and deformable objects tend to be difficult to implement in rigid body simulators.

Our model can fail to maintain the shape and color of objects during interaction, and at times, objects may completely disappear. Additionally, when objects are occluded or displayed at unfavorable angles, their appearance can become distorted throughout the generation.

The generation on the left demonstrates that our model has an emergent understanding of physical properties, as evidenced by the spoon falling to the table when released by the gripper. However, there are many instances where generations fail to adhere to physical laws, such as on the right where the plate remains suspended in the air.

We placed EVE in front of a mirror to see if generations would result in mirrored actions, but we did not see successful recognition or “self-understanding"

As shown by the examples above, there is still much work to be done. World models have the potential to solve general purpose simulation and evaluation, enabling robots that are safe, reliable, and intelligent in a wide variety of scenarios. As such, we see this effort as a grand challenge in robotics that the community can work on solving together. To help accelerate progress towards solving world models for robotics, we are 

releasing over 100 hours of vector-quantized video

 (Apache 2.0), pretrained baseline models, and the 

, a three-stage challenge with cash prizes.

Compression Challenge | Prize: $10,000 USD

The first challenge, compression, is about how well one can minimize training loss on an extremely diverse robot dataset. The lower the loss, the better the model understands the training data. Even though there are many different ways to implement a world model, optimizing loss well is a general objective that underpins nearly all large-scale deep learning tasks. A $10k prize is awarded to the first submission that achieves a loss of 8.0 on our private test set. The Github repo provides code and pretrained 

The second challenge, sampling, is about how well and how quickly a model can generate videos of the future. Details of the Sampling Challenge will be announced soon, based on lessons learned from running the Stage 1 Challenge.

The third challenge, evaluation, is our holy grail: can you predict how well a robot performs before you test it in the real world? Details of the Evaluation Challenge will be announced after we’ve learned lessons from Stage 1 and Stage 2 Challenges.

If you’re excited about these directions, we have 

 on the 1X AI team. Internally, we have a large dataset of high resolution robot data across even more diverse scenarios. Our ambitions for world models go beyond just solving the general evaluation problem; once you can step an agent in this world model and perform evaluation, you can follow on with 

1X World Model

We have previously developed an autonomous model that can 

 goal-conditioned neural network. However, when multi-task models are small (<100M parameters), adding data to fix one task’s behavior often adversely affects behaviors on other tasks. Increasing the model parameter count can mitigate this forgetting problem, but also take longer to train, which slows down our ability to find out what demonstrations we should gather to improve robot behavior.

How do we iterate quickly on the data while building a generalist robot that can do many tasks with a single neural network? We want to decouple our ability to quickly improve task performance from our ability to merge multiple capabilities into a single neural network. To accomplish this, we’ve built a voice-controlled natural language interface to chain short-horizon capabilities across multiple small models into longer ones. With humans directing the skill chaining, this allows us to accomplish the long-horizon behaviors shown in this video:

Although humans can do long horizon chores trivially, chaining multiple autonomous robot skills in a sequence is hard because the second skill has to generalize to all the slightly random starting positions that the robot finds itself in when the first skill finishes. This compounds with every successive skill - the third skill has to handle the variation in outcomes of the second skill, and so forth.

From the user perspective, the robot is capable of doing many natural language tasks and the actual number of models controlling the robot is abstracted away. This allows us to merge the single-task models into goal-conditioned models over time. Single-task models also provide a good baseline to do 

 evaluations: comparing how a new model’s predictions differ from an existing baseline at test-time. Once the goal-conditioned model matches single-task model predictions well, we can switch over to a more powerful, unified model with no change to the user workflow.

Directing robots with this high-level language interface offers a new user experience for data collection. Instead of using VR to control a single robot, an operator can direct multiple robots with high level language and let the low-level policies execute low-level actions to realize those high-level goals. Because high-level actions are sent infrequently, operators can even control robots remotely, as shown below:

Note that the above video is not completely autonomous; humans are dictating when robots should switch tasks. Naturally, the next step after building a dataset of vision-to-natural language command pairs is to automate the prediction of high level actions using vision-language models like 

AI Update: Voice Commands & Chaining Tasks

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Experience NEO

NEO Gamma is the next generation of home humanoids designed and engineered by 1X Technologies. The Gamma series includes improvements across NEO’s hardware and AI, featuring a new design that is deeply considerate of life at home.


NEO Gamma's new design features Emotive Ear Rings to improve the communication and has a minimalist design aesthetic that fits into the home.




NEO can now walk with a natural human gait and arm swings, squat down to pick things up from the ground and sit in chairs.




NEO Gamma comes outfitted with soft covers to reduce impact on the surrounding environment and increase overall safety.




1X trained a visual manipulation model capable of picking up a large variety of objects in different scenarios, including environments not seen during training.




NEO Gamma’s Companion feature set integrates a new in-house language model that enables natural conversation and body language.

NEO Gamma’s design opens the door to start internal home testing—a first step in creating fully autonomous humanoids.

“There is a not-so-distant future where we all have our own robot helper at home, like Rosey the Robot or Baymax. But for humanoid robots to truly integrate into everyday life, they must be developed alongside humans, not in isolation.

The home provides real-world context and the diversity of data needed for humanoids to grow in intelligence and autonomy. It also teaches them the nuances of human life—how to open the door for the elderly, move carefully around pets, or adapt to the unpredictability of the surrounding world. Robots confined to industrial space or lab development miss out on this critical understanding.

With NEO Gamma, every engineering and design decision was made with one goal in mind: getting NEO into customers’ homes as quickly as possible… We’re close. We can’t wait to share more soon.”

NEO Gamma introduces a number of AI advancements, enhancing both autonomy and safe teleoperation in the home.




NEO now walks with a natural human gait and arm swings, squat down to pick things up from the ground and sit in chairs, all while maintaining balance. These dynamic control skills – running at 100Hz – are learned using Reinforcement Learning from human motion capture data. This range of motion allows NEO Gamma to experience household scenarios and tasks that would be otherwise inaccessible to other robot form factors.




1X trained a visual manipulation model capable of picking up a large variety of objects in different scenarios, including environments not seen during training. NEO Gamma leverages neural networks trained to predict teleoperated actions directly from raw sensor data.




NEO Gamma’s Companion feature set integrates a conversational voice interface, allowing users to converse naturally with a 1X developed language model (LLM). These developments bring NEO closer to human-friendly user interaction, bridging the gap between humanoid robotics and daily life.

NEO Gamma is designed to be approachable, with all new features created to integrate seamlessly into people’s everyday lives. NEO’s new look aims to complement living spaces rather than disrupt them.




NEO Gamma’s Ear Rings provide real-time visual feedback for a more intuitive and interactive experience.




3D printed from durable and soft nylon using a Japanese Shimaseki machine, the suit utilizes a unique whole-garment seamless knitting process that allows the fabric to conform to NEO without impeding performance.




With safety as the top priority, NEO Gamma features 1X’s Tendon Drive for joint actuation, encased in soft covers to enhance passive safety.

NEO Gamma features significant hardware upgrades, making it quieter, more reliable, and well suited to deliver a consumer product experience.




NEO Gamma boasts a 10x increase in hardware reliability and a 10 dB decrease in noise, bringing NEO’s operating levels down to the level of a refrigerator.




NEO Gamma features four microphones (front, back, left, and right) with beamforming and echo cancellation, ensuring crystal-clear audio capture and A three-speaker system—one in the chest for AI voice interactions and two outward-facing speakers in the pelvis for bass, 360-degree sound effects, and music.

Introducing NEO Gamma

 1X announces the acquisition of Kind Humanoid, uniting two robotics teams with aligned visions to advance humanoid technology.

“It’s rare to find someone who is not just a powerhouse engineer but also completely aligned philosophically and strategically on how humanoids as products should take shape,” said Bernt Bornich, CEO of 1X. “Having Christoph join the 1X team here in the Bay will accelerate our path to a world full of humanoid robots."

Kind Humanoid’s unique expertise and culture complement 1X’s mission to create an abundance of labor through safe and intelligent humanoids. The relationship between the two newly joined companies is built on the foundational belief that humanoids need to be developed alongside humans-- living and learning among us.

“Joining 1X feels like the perfect next chapter for Kind Humanoid,” said Christoph Kohstall, CEO of Kind Humanoid. “From starting out in a small garage to now becoming part of a team that shares our belief in humanoids living and learning among us, this acquisition brings our vision closer to reality. Together, we can create robots that truly connect with people and make a difference where it matters most.”

Kind Humanoid is a Palo Alto-based robotics startup founded by Christoph Kohstall, a former scientist at Stanford and member of Google's robotics team. The company developed Mona, a bipedal humanoid robot designed for home use and to bring additional labor to fields such as healthcare. Operating from a small garage, the team brought together a deeply bio-inspired robot body with advanced Al and large language models developing a robot that can interact with and assist everyday people.

1X is a leader in humanoid robotics, developing general-purpose robots designed to live and learn among humans in the home—an early step toward advancing physical intelligence. With a focus on safety, 1X is at the forefront of the next wave of robotics, offering products that are accessible and practical for everyday use. 1X’s mission is to create an abundance of labor through safe, intelligent humanoids that work alongside people

1X Acquires Kind Humanoid

Our goal with this video was to create a fun and exciting glimpse into a not-so-distant future where humanoids cook delicious meals for us.

After connecting with Nick and his team, we brainstormed ideas for an engaging narrative. When Nick suggested a robot cook-off with NEO Beta as the “final boss,” we quickly set to work refining our cooking skills.

While cooking a steak dinner from start to finish was an impressive demonstration of NEO Beta's ability to navigate complex tasks, it is important to note that this showcase was done using teleoperation to ensure the successful execution of all tasks involved. That said, the only thing standing between NEO and a fully autonomous, medium-rare steak is the input data.

In the video, NEO Beta and Nick met up in Sunnyvale, California, near the 1X headquarters, for a home cooking showdown to see who could make the perfect medium-rare steak. The audience would ultimately decide the winner.

Nick generously brought NEO Beta a custom “Chef NEO” coat and stocked the fridges with more Wagyu beef than any humanoid could ever need.

: We (wrongly) assumed NEO Beta might mess up at least one steak since this was an entirely new skill. To be safe, we had multiple backup steaks on hand. Proving us wrong, NEO Beta nailed it on the first try, and the 1X team and Nick got to enjoy the extra steaks afterward.

The shoot was full of laughs, imperfections like knocking over the olive oil, and memorable moments like when NEO Beta pulled off butter basting—reminding everyone on set they were witnessing a landmark moment in the history of home robotics.

: Nick admitted that NEO Beta was a better chef than Gordon Ramsay and Uncle Roger. He asked us to keep it a secret, but we couldn’t resist sharing.

While videos like this are extremely fun and important for showing the masses that humanoid robots are here and the fun is just beginning– we find it equally important to be transparent about how we capture these shots to maintain trust in the robotics community and set the right expectations for our product.

All movements were powered by 1X’s VR Teleoperation App running on Meta Quest.

NEO Beta's lines were filmed using voice pass-through with a filter. Although NEO is equipped with real-time conversation capabilities via our GPT-4o voice integration, we opted for controlled dialogue to align with Nick’s vision for the video.

NEO Beta’s voice was designed in collaboration with Nick’s team to find a tone that was playful and appealing to both his audience and our vision of NEO as a friendly, home-assisting humanoid.

: Although NEO Beta successfully cooked a meal alongside Nick, cooking won’t be an immediate feature available to the first NEO users. We want to ensure NEO gains experience with safer tasks before handling sharp or hot objects.

: While NEO Beta completed all tasks from seasoning the steak to flipping and removing it from the pan end to end, NEO Beta did require assistance to turn on the burner. Nick and his team felt that including this scene was important for their audience, so we agreed to create this article for transparency.

We’re incredibly excited that NEO Beta was able to cook a full steak dinner with minimal assistance. Sooner than you think, NEO will be cooking similar meals—and more—in your kitchen.

Huge thanks to Nick, Tim and Zach for putting this all together.

We hope you enjoyed the video. Share it with friends and family and let us know what you all think on 

Cooking With NEO Beta and Nick DiGiovanni

San Francisco Bay, CA, and Moss, Norway — August 30, 2024 — 1X, a pioneer in humanoid robotics, unveils NEO Beta, a prototype of its bipedal humanoid designed for home use.

NEO Beta represents a significant advancement in robotics, moving beyond traditional, stiff robots to humanoids with bio-inspired designs that can safely work among people. The NEO Beta launch marks a major milestone for 1X as the company transitions from conceptual development to bringing humanoid robots into consumer households. In the video released, we show how NEO is safe to work among people. NEO has been designed to be produced at scale in the company’s factory in Moss, Norway.

“Our priority is safety,” said Bernt Børnich, CEO at 1X. “Safety is the cornerstone that allows us to confidently introduce NEO Beta into homes, where it will gather essential feedback and demonstrate its capabilities in real-world settings. This year, we are deploying a limited number of NEO units in selected homes for research and development purposes. Doing so means we are taking another step toward achieving our mission.”

1X’s mission is to create an abundant supply of physical labor through safe, intelligent humanoids that work alongside people. To achieve this goal, 1X humanoids must be exposed to diverse environments to become fully capable of performing a wide range of tasks.

1X is a leader in humanoid robotics, creating general-purpose robots for the home as a first step in solving physical intelligence. With a focus on safety, 1X is at the forefront of the next wave of robotics, delivering products that are accessible and practical for consumers' households. 1X’s mission is to create an abundant supply of physical labor through safe, intelligent humanoids that work alongside people.

1X Unveils NEO Beta, A Humanoid Robot for the Home

San Francisco, CA, and Moss, Norway — July 22, 2024

 — 1X, an AI robotics company, is pleased to announce the appointments of three strategic hires. Jorge Milburn joins 1X as VP of Sales, Dar Sleeper as VP of Growth and Per Selvaag as VP of Design. These hires come as 1X prepares to bring its bipedal humanoid robot, NEO, to market, delivering on its mission to create an abundance of labor through safe, intelligent humanoids.

Backed by OpenAI, 1X has revolutionized humanoid robotics with NEO, a lightweight and soft bipedal robot capable of performing tasks through voice commands and natural language. To further progress on our mission, we are appointing 3 new hires.

 joins 1X as VP of Sales, bringing nearly 10 years of go-to-market experience at Tesla. He recently served as Global Head of Growth. He played a pivotal role in building the Supercharger network and led Tesla’s car business in EMEA, successfully introducing the Model 3 to Europe and establishing a Global Growth team. Originally from Uruguay, Jorge holds an MA in Economics. His responsibilities at Tesla included sales leadership, business planning, demand and supply optimization, delivery operations, and business analytics.



 joins 1X as VP of Design, bringing over 20 years of experience in design, user research, data analytics, and robotics. His career includes roles as Chief Designer at Automobiles Peugeot, lead designer at BMW, and establishing the Human-Centered Design discipline at Equinor Data Science. He also founded and led a successful consultancy in the Bay Area.



 joins as VP of Growth to build lead demand and brand in the Bay Area. Most recently, a product manager at Tesla, Dar, played a key role in launching the campaign for Cybertruck and created lead demand for electric vehicles.

"I am thrilled to welcome Jorge, Per and Dar," said Bernt Øivind Børnich, CEO of 1X. "Their expertise will be crucial as we prepare to bring NEO to market and enhance our products' design and user experience."


1X is a US-Norwegian AI robotics company specializing in developing robots with humanlike capabilities. With commercial deployments of the wheeled humanoid EVE and the ongoing production of their next product, a bipedal humanoid robot NEO, 1X builds their own models for embodied AI making robots capable of task manipulation and generalization. Our mission is to push the boundaries of AI and robotics to create a global abundance of labor through safe, intelligent humanoids.

1X World Model: Sampling Challenge Update

1X World Model

AI Update: Voice Commands & Chaining Tasks

ExperienceNEO