1X Technologies reveals Neo robot hand — human-level grip strength, shipping this year

Speaker 1: We'll to you soon.

Speaker 4: Take care, guys.

Speaker 1: Have a good one. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And our next guest is Bernt from one x. He's the founder and CEO. How are you doing? What is that? Hi, you. Good. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. That is incredible.

Speaker 7: My hand, and then it's like Neo's hand.

Speaker 1: Yes. Introduce the launch today. What happened? Tell us about it.

Speaker 7: I mean, we've been cooking on this for quite a while. Yeah. So super excited to finally show this to the world. And Mhmm. Also, it's just so exciting because we're so close to shipping now. Yeah. So everyone's gonna pick this apart anyway.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 7: So we don't need to be careful anymore. We can just like open it up and to me, it's this beautiful machine that becomes almost more art than engineering, right, at this point. Interesting. Yeah. We're we're excited to show people what we've been cooking and excited to put it in people's hands. And I think also, it has a special place in my heart because we're working on this problem for more than a decade. Mhmm. And one thing that Neo and OneX has really been pushing is how to use highly miniaturized, high power motors and tendons to create these machines that mimic humans. And the hands is the kinda culmination of all that work. Right? It's it's where all of the complexity comes together to to meet the world, and hopefully, we've created something here that can really remove that final barrier for how intelligent our models can become. Right? Like Mhmm. So much of human intelligence comes from our ability to to probe the world for truth and to really figure out how the world works through our hands.

Speaker 2: Okay. Take us through the full journey of developing hands for Neo. A lot of people in tech love to, you know, follow an an Elon style playbook, just make the most simple version of something, simplify, simplify, simplify. This looks incredibly beautiful, but also incredibly complex. And so I wanna understand, like, how you how you got here basically, like, version by version. So

Speaker 7: it is a very complicated hand, but in my opinion, it is the simplest version of it that exists that is good enough to do what needs to happen. So first of all, One X is fully vertically integrated, so we do absolutely everything in house. And in our factory here in California where I'm sitting right now, we do everything from designing the production processes to producing our own motors, our own tendons, the entire system, right, sensors, electronics, everything in house. And that allows us to iterate very, very fast because I do really believe in, like, you have to have this first principles approach. Right? So start with, like, what what am I trying to solve? We're quite lucky in that we have humans to look at with respect to how do you solve this problem. Nature did a pretty good job.

Speaker 1: So when you say you're you're you're looking at humans, what type of training data are you using? What's useful? What are you discarding from just there's a lot of hand videos on the Internet, I'm sure. People doing all sorts of things. You can do teleoperation. You can have people wear gloves and do motion capture. You can do simulation.

Speaker 2: Get x-ray.

Speaker 1: Yeah. X-ray. I mean, there's so many different ways. Like, you're using everything. Is there one one path that you found specifically valuable?

Speaker 7: So I think actually, it starts from, like, starting with first principles. Right? So Womx has always been about we want to design robots that are safe so they can live and learn among people. Mhmm. But also because safety is what allows us to learn. Mhmm. So we probe the world for truth and of course if our fingers break while doing that or we break whatever we're trying to touch, it doesn't work.

Speaker 8: Mhmm.

Speaker 5: So you

Speaker 7: need to design this beautiful kind of like compliant soft systems that force can flow both ways because you're both seeing with your hands and acting with your hands. Mhmm. And that's really what this is all about. So like how do you create that? And you kind of have to look at how nature works like our muscle. Nothing really moves fast. There's no gears. No nothing like this. So we've designed this from these first principles. But we go way deeper than that. I think what we haven't talked enough about yet, and we'll share more about this later, is like how incredibly seriously we take closing the gap towards the human. And it's not to look like a human. It's because we want the work system to work like a human. So even, like, if you look at Neil's hand behind me here, we worked so deeply on how do you make these fingers nonlinearly just, like, be compliant exactly like a human finger. Mhmm. Because if you get all these details right, you can take all of the video that's out there on the Internet. You can train

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 7: Huge role models based on this, and it just works on a robot. And that's what the Rolex Robot Lab is about. So to enable that general intelligence for robotics, you need to design the robot so that it interacts with the world exactly like a human. And then you wanna do that with the least amount of complexity possible, and that's essentially what we have here. But of course, the complexity of that is pretty high because you're you're mimicking a human head.

Speaker 1: Let's talk about grip strength. We got grip strength testers here in the studio. Is this an important benchmark clicking these together? How strong is the hand currently? Where do you wanna go? Because it feels like there's a trade off there where if the hand, like, the stronger you make the hand, the heavier, the more, the more dangerous it could potentially be. At the same time, there's certain tasks that you expect a certain level of grip strength.

Speaker 2: Also, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it'd be interesting to understand how often tasks come up in your daily life where you need like insane grip strength.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Speaker 1: It's pretty rare, I think. But certainly in, you know, industrial capacity or even around the home, picking things up, moving a chair, you need to be able to grab it without dropping it. It's a safety issue at the end of the day.

Speaker 7: Yeah. I think it it actually appears quite often, but you don't think so much about it because you don't do it for a long period. Like Yeah. Yeah, you're not grasping that hard, but then something starts slipping and you tighten your grip or, like, you're actually using quite a bit of force. So the hand is roughly the same. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. The hand is roughly the same strength as an average human. Really? So that's so you I mean, it needs to be able to do the full capabilities of a robot. Right? So the robot can deadlift a 150 pounds. So the hands need to hold the bar of a 150 pounds. Yeah. Not because deadlifting is useful in everyday life, but because it's a good metric for like how capable we are. Yeah. So we really worked hard to make that kind of power to weight ratio also about the same as human. Mhmm. So if you look at the general hands in the market right now, this thing is roughly three times as high force as the other hands.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 7: That is really also something that's gonna enable a lot of new applications. Right? Because in the end, your AI will be as smart as the diversity of the experiences that you have lived and experienced. Like, diversity of data is directly correlated with the intelligence of your model. If you are a third as strong as a human in your hands, there's a lot of tasks you just can't do.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I have one more. It feels like you have jumped to the frontier of hands specifically. Is I saw people joking, can I just buy the hand? Obviously, they're making probably rude jokes. But is there a world where you partner with other robotics companies to sell a piece of your hardware, maybe just the hand to someone else that already has a wheeled robot but it needs a hand? Is there a world where you're selling parts of your technology or do you want to be vertically integrated from end to end the full experience?

Speaker 7: I think there there is a world like this. Mhmm. I do think it's very important though that like we wanna we were we're about to also launch Neo as a platform where we we're gonna invite everyone in to build on this. Mhmm. And having, a homogeneous platform that everyone is building on is so incredibly powerful because that doesn't exist today, and that really allows you to do benchmarks across systems like you have in the rest of the AI community. But that being said, it's not a hill we're going to die on. Like if the collaborations are the right types of collaborations, we just want to make sure we can scale our manufacturing and get as many out there as possible and build the ecosystem and really give robotics all the love it deserves. Right?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Totally.

Speaker 7: We just wanna accelerate the path.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Amazing. Timeline around shipping. What what's what's the what's the update there? I know a bunch of people that are that are in line that have that have ordered. So everyone's So,

Speaker 7: yeah, I'll be kind to my team and not give you a specific date. But we have promised that we are going to ship this year, and we will ship this year. So we're gonna keep that promise, and it's gonna be incredibly exciting. And like I said, like, reason the we can be so open, right, so you can just read into that. Like I said, the reason we can be so open is that this is about to ship. So people will pick it apart anyway. That's fair. I do think this is gonna be so big. Right? Like, as AI now becomes physical, it's really hard to understand what kind of impact that will have.

Speaker 6: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: We're getting so much interest from, let's say, wet labs that want to have their AI for science actually design, manufacture, and run their experiments. There's, like, hospitality, elderly care. You have the home that we're already working towards. Like, there's this enormous surface area, and it's gonna happen a lot sooner than people think. And I think right now, it's just about really growing the pie and making sure that everyone has platforms that they can work on to to solve these hard problems.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Amazing. How will I mean, the last question I have is like like this this feels like a a technology that even after you solve development, design, and the the the AI that powers all of this, like, is much more gated by the real world and thus we would see like a slower takeoff. Like what we've seen with Waymo, it's everywhere in San Francisco but as you go around the world, don't realize that cars can drive themselves. Whereas, you know, chattybt.com was available in every country and it was just like the touring test is passed for everyone at the exact same time and that's that feels impossible in robotics in the physical world, but do you have a different view of it or am I roughly correct with that prediction?

Speaker 7: The ramp is gonna be slower, but the total uptake is gonna be way way way higher.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 7: Right? So like, if you think about and I'm I'm very bullish on this. Like, I think it's just a couple of two to three years away. Wow. But even if it's a decade away, like Yeah. Robots will build robots. Yeah. And we're already working on this in the factory. But they won't just build the robots. They'll build the data centers, the chip fab, the energy infrastructure, get into mining and refining. Yeah. And this full automation of the physical substrate that enables everything including intelligence Mhmm. That can only happen with robotics. Yeah. And that's gonna look like this. Right? Yeah. So you you need you need to kinda like enter that curve, And I think the uptake ramp is gonna be slower in the beginning, but way way way higher as you kinda, like, hit vertical on the curve.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 7: And I think this is also where it gets extremely interesting. Right? I'm back to, like, how we're gonna solve some of the remaining problems in science, how we're gonna create an actual true abundance of labor across society. Yeah. This is only possible if you automate the physical substrate. So it's gonna take slightly longer, but it's also worth it because the impact is so tremendous.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And it it still should be an exponential curve because once you get to the point where, you know, five robots can make one more robot in a month, then you wind up compounding and the exponential just grows and grows and grows. Fascinating. Very exciting times. Congratulations and thank you so much for coming on

Speaker 2: the I'm super excited you guys shared this and Thanks, guys. You guys continue to have the the best aesthetics Yeah. In robotics by by a 100 x.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It makes me feel more much more c three p o than, Terminator, which I think is the right the right direction to go.

Speaker 2: The hand's a little Terminator.

Speaker 7: A 100%.

Speaker 1: The hand's a little Terminator.

Speaker 7: Should not underestimate how important it's going to be to do this together with people in Yeah. Sense of like, adoption needs to come through making everyone used to this technology. Right?

Speaker 5: Totally. We we wanna make

Speaker 7: sure everyone understands how helpful this can be and really make sure that we don't don't hit any barriers where, like, this becomes something that people don't want because it's such a great opportunity, and we wanna make sure we can accelerate the path.

Speaker 1: Yeah. VR, you know, VR was useful in in certain pockets, but it it was awkward and it was never adopted and it was always seen as like this this like yeah. Very like niche technology. And I I think the the aesthetics are underrated, so congratulations on nailing them. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2: Great stuff.

Speaker 1: Have a great day.

Speaker 7: Awesome. Thank you, guys. Cheers.

Speaker 1: Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. We have Thibault joining in just forty minutes or thirty minutes to give us the update on 5.6 and what's going on in Codex, of course.