'I have no mouth, and I must clean': Just in time for Halloween, this $20,000 robot allows a human operator to look through its eyes for training purposes

Hey, remember that time a onesie wearing robot gave Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang a leather jacket? No? I'll remind you—the robot in question was the Neo Gamma, a humanoid bot built by 1X Technologies for helping out around the home. Now, you can pre-order the Gamma's successor, simply called 'Neo'…for $20,000.

CEO and founder of 1X Tech Bernt Bornich announced the launch of pre-orders via X on Tuesday, but the price is far from the only thing giving me pause. Slated for a 2026 release, the Neo is pitched as a humanoid robot that will be able to take care of household chores autonomously. However, it looks like the Gamma could only just about put a glass into a dishwasher, so what strides has the Neo made since?

Well, it turns out this robot has much to learn; Engadget reports that the Neo will lean heavily on tele-operation at least to begin with. In other words, you're not just welcoming Neo into your home, but potentially the 1X Tech employee piloting it remotely too.

The hope is that the real world experience that comes from tele-operation in early adopters' homes can be leveraged as AI training data (so yes, you'd also be welcoming a camera into your home too). When The Wall Street Journal spent the day with 1X's humanoid robot, Bernt Bornich clarified, "I think it's quite important for me to just say that, in 2026, if you buy this product, it is because you're okay with that social contract. If we don't have your data, we can't make the product better."

Early adopters will be able to schedule tele-operating sessions via an app, as well as set robo-no-go zones throughout their home that the Neo will be blocked from entering at a software level. Furthermore, the company can blur out residents' so the remote Neo operator cannot see them, and teleoperators can't take control of Neo without the owner's approval.

I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird. | WSJ - YouTube

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Bornich makes the company's case to The Wall Street journal, elaborating "I'm a big fan of what I call, like, big brother, big sister principle, right? Big sister helps you. Big brother is just there to kinda monitor you. And we are very much the big sister. Depending on how much you want to trade, we can be more useful. And you decide where on the scale you want to be."

Personally, I think there's more than just a simple branding issue at play here. Besides the obvious privacy concerns, I'm also left wondering, if someone can afford to drop $20,000 on a product that is not necessarily feature complete, why wouldn't they then just…pay another human a living wage to clean their house?

Perhaps that's naive of me—but, having seen the tele-operated Neo visibly struggle to close a dishwasher, surely hiring another actually skilled human is better value for money? Simply put, I don't think Neo is the future of household labour—either in how it gets done or how we value it.

Bornich ultimately attempts to reassure interested customers, "When you get your Neo in 2026, it will do most of the things in your home autonomously. The quality of that work will vary, and will improve drastically quite fast as we get data."

Again, there's that big tech insistence that if we just feed the AI enough data, we'll end up in that robo-maid, flying car future. I'm doubtful to say the least, especially when the cost of admittance is 'please welcome our cameras into your home'. Sure, 1X Tech will blur the faces but I'd argue my household mess remains pretty identifying.

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