The Future of Humanoid Robots With 1X's Bernt Bornich - Ep. 259

0:10Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. As we move deeper into the age of physical AI, advanced humanoid robots are reshaping industries and enhancing daily life. Advancements in AI models and simulation tools are enabling robots to perform complex tasks with greater dexterity and efficiency, and foundation models are playing a key role in generalizing robot tasks. Here with us to pull the curtain back a little more on the rapidly developing world of humanoid robotics is Bernd Bornick. Bernd is founder and CEO of 1x Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that's dedicated to building fully autonomous humanoid robots.

0:49Bernd, welcome and thank you so much for joining the AI podcast. Thank you, Noah. So can we start with a little bit about your journey, how you got into the field? Sure. So to me, this has kind of been a lifelong journey. So as a kid, I was the kind of kid who picked everything apart to figure out what's inside. I think nothing with motors in it of our kitchen appliances survived in the early days. and I also just I was very lucky I grew up with a dad that loved building things we built soapbox cars in the garage we went all in like welded aluminium frames and chassis and then I discovered computers right and we're back in like Commodore 64 and then like early I think it was Intel 286 like the first one but like the first kind of like computer I had my had my only for me right in my room was like a 486 okay And I really got into programming.

1:42Right. Mainly due to games. Yeah, sure. Being part of the mod community, making mods for games is a big thing. One of my childhood heroes is John Carmack. Right. And I learned writing code by reading his Quake code. And then, you know, at some point it clicks and you're just like, wait a minute, I can type code and this thing moves. Right. And like connecting these two realities, right? Yeah. The digital and the physical is like, it's just magical. It's magic, yeah. And yeah, one thing led to another. And very early, I think I was like 11, I decided I want to make humanoid robots. And then I follow the field ever since.

2:17Right, right. So I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy alive, right? Yeah, that's amazing. I get to do my childhood dream. Every day in the morning, I get up. And like, even now I get up and there's a robot walking around in my house. Right. And it's absolutely magical. That's amazing. So tell us a little bit about 1X then. What inspired, I mean, you've been talking about your journey, inspired by everything you've been doing since you were a kid. But how did the company get started? And maybe you can talk a little bit about the unique approach your company brings to building humanoids. Sure. So I think it comes a lot back to how do you build intelligence, right?

2:47So we talk a lot about physical intelligence, but to me, it's intelligence is intelligence. There are physical aspects and there's digital aspects. And we started out with the internet and we still do to kind of bootstrap because it's what we have. But if you want to get to actual AGI, you need to learn in the real world. And if you want to learn in the real world, the same rules apply as in any kind of AI model. And there's almost some poetry in it, right? Because intelligence comes from diversity. And this is very clear in our digital AI models. You have to have information from all kinds of different dialogues, histories, whatever it is across the internet.

3:26If you try to create a very good language model to write poems by only reading poems, it's not going to work. You need the diversity of everything that is human knowledge and how we think. Same is true for robots. So if you have a robot that kind of grows up, lives its life, and dies in a factory work cell, moving something from A to B, it's not going to be very intelligent. It's not going to give you a lot of information. So it actually has to happen among people. So the first thing to realize is that for robots to be truly intelligent and also for them to have all the nuances that we appreciate throughout our life, like being careful around your pet, holding the door open for someone that's elderly and generally behaving like we want them to behave.

4:12They have to live and learn among us. So that means robots have to be safe. And that, I think, is the thing we've spent the most time on in OneX from day one, 10 years ago, is how do you build a system that is as capable as a human? So it needs to be very strong. It needs to be fast. And it needs to generally be very dexterous, but still as safe as a human. And this is kind of counterintuitive because we think about robots as this big, stiff, heavy, dangerous things, right? At least for me with a robotics background, right? Because you're used to the industrial robots. Right. I was going to say, I just see the videos of the robot dogs running around and I'm like, oh, they're agile there, but yeah.

4:46They are, but like industrial robots are typically extremely dangerous, right? It's very high energy devices. And if you get hit by a robot, it's really dangerous. We even have a word for it, right? In robotics, we call anything that's not planned for a collision. Well, turns out that humans collide like many times every minute, right? It's all we do because this world around us is so unstructured. It's incredibly hard to plan for when you will actually hit the world. So you need to build robots that like if we go running because we're in a hurry and we crash around the corner, then might be awkward, might be painful, but it's not dangerous, right?

5:18That's what we want to build. So we set out to do that. I think we've gotten very far. We have a robot now that's just 30 kilos or about 66 pounds. Wow, okay. It's as strong as an adult human. So it can squat or deadlift like 150 pounds. So that's roughly actually human athlete level in power to weight. Okay. But also the energy in the system is just incredibly low when moving because we have these tendon drives where we're pulling tendons, loosely inspired by muscle, instead of using the more classical, heavily geared industrial approaches. Okay, and that helps with efficiency? It helps with efficiency.

5:50But most of all, it helps with being soft and compliant. It helps with trying not to nerd out too much on the math here, but I have to. So this principle is actually very simple. It is when a robot moves its joint, then of course the joint itself rotates to move the arm. So let's say that that rotates at a certain velocity, a certain speed. And then inside you have a gear. So now let's say the gear ratio is 100 to 1. Then the components inside, they're also at 100 times faster than the joint. energy in a system is the velocity squared. This is why you learn in school that a car that goes twice as fast is not twice as dangerous, it's four times as dangerous.

6:29So you can just think about it. If you see something spinning at 20 ,000 RPM, even if it's pretty light, and I ask you to stick your fingers inside, your entire body is going to go, no, no, no, no, I don't want to do that. Because you have this intuition, right? There's a lot of energy in that. And that is true. So if you look at these systems, for a typical robot, it actually has about 10 times the amount of energy due to the drivetrain. Right, okay. And a nice analogy is just think about a kettlebell. Right. So it's kind of like you attach a 10, 15 kilogram or like 30 pound kettlebell to the wrist of the robot and then you go and do everything you're supposed to do.

7:05That's like the effective mass just or weight just projected from the drivetrain. Right, okay. And that's what we get rid of. Right. So it's not just that the tendons are soft. They're not that soft. It's that you don't actually have these high gear ratios And that means that your system is super dynamic and agile, because this is how nature works. We generally have like 0.7 to 1.2 in ratio. That's like the animal kingdom where the animals are agile. But also, it's what makes us safe, right? And we'll get back to this when we talk about how we learn. But needless to say, we need to be safe to be among people.

7:40But also, we need to be safe to be able to explore. That's how humans learn. We need to be able to interact with the world and fail. And then the world should be okay, and we should be okay, and we can try again. And this has been like a canonical problem in robotics, because robots are stiff and high energy. So you can never fail. Of course, we fail all the time. That's how we learn. So that's one, sorry, long answer, but that's the first one. And the second one is affordability. If you have a system that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can to some extent defend that if it's in a factory working 24-7, it's still a relatively low hourly rate.

8:14but it's not going to get you to hundreds of millions of robots in homes so that you can get to actual true intelligence. So those are the two main things we focused on early on. It's just it needs to be safe, it needs to be very affordable and then of course it needs to get the job done. So it needs to be able to do the things. So should we talk about learning? We can talk a bit about learning. Let's talk about learning. I've been hearing about foundational models. I've been hearing about reinforcement learning. I've been seeing demos of robots that learn by, you know, a human doing a task. And then whether it's through cameras or physical sensors, the robot learns from that.

8:50What, in your view, are kind of the most significant advancements in robot learning? I mean, recently, but you can go back because you've been doing this for years now. But, you know, what do you think are some of the milestones that really changed the way that we develop robots? So we do this from the AI side first, because we already talked a bit about how we developed the robots. Right. The field has like a history of, we started with robots, right? In AI. If you go back even to early days of OpenAI and like their Rubrics Cube and also their gym, right? And all of these agentic behaviors with RL, because you get pretty far on this and it's a very interesting way to approach intelligence, right?

9:28I would say that in general, all of the early models out of DeepMind, they're actually closer in my opinion to AGI than a lot of the things we have today. like in the approach that they're taking. Okay. Can you dig into that a little bit? Well, it's just about how we learn, right? How do you create reasoning tokens and like these long-term deep reasoning tokens, right? And you can write them out or try to bootstrap them or you can have them naturally emerge from kind of like whatever reward you're tuning with respect to how you survive in the world, right? Let's say like for humanity, it's the ultimate one has been basically survival, right?

10:01And I think there's still this kind of open question of exactly how the reasoning emerge naturally just from data. And there seems to be a lot more tangible proof there. But then the realization is we don't have the data, right? So where do we have the data? Well, we have the internet. So now if we have the internet, let's use that data. And then turns out that you can get really freaking far, right? It works surprisingly well. So that's really where I think like the last few years have been. And some canonical, very important problems have to a large degree been solved, right now what has not been solved is things like spatial reasoning we say that these language models have a world understanding and they're kind of like a world model but they still catastrophically fail on very simple things like just if i move one meter forward will i collide right it's 50 50 where it gets it right so it doesn't understand physics that well and in general you can clearly see that like the data we have does not contain necessarily disinformation about the world.

11:00What's also extremely interesting is that all of these different approaches are merging. And this kind of all always happens once you go through a full cycle. And we see now in LLMs that they're using unsupervised learning, supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and like everything comes together to solve the problem, right? It's just the question is mainly in which order do you do this? And a very interesting part of this is what we call grounding or verifiable truth for your model. So think about when you have a reasoning model, it's pretty good at math, actually starting to be amazing at math.

11:35And the same at coding, because you can verify whether or not your solution is correct. And as long as you can do this, you can apply reinforcement learning really well. Now, robots are kind of like the ultimate tool to verify truth, because ground truth is literally the ground, right? So like when you have robots in the real world, anything is verifiable. Some of it might be quite convoluted to get to an answer. But everything is verifiable. That's how we ground our reality, right? We have the real world. And I think this is going to be where the biggest impact from humanoids is going to be. It will progress AI in general, not just physical intelligence.

12:13Because back to what I said, in my mind, they are the same, right? They're different aspects of the same. So to more directly answer your question, though, I think right now in robotics, the way we approach this is we have reinforcement learning in the bottom, where we learn how to handle our body and how to handle our own dexterity. And this works pretty well because we can do this on relatively simple tasks, right? So like if you think about walking, running, just squatting down or sitting in a couch and getting up or like all of these kinds of things, then the object interactions are pretty simple, right?

12:46The ground is basically roughly flat. Maybe it's not completely flat. You can model this a bit, not too flat, but it's pretty simple compared to like you're peeling a shrimp, which is very complicated with respect to like how does this object deform what's the different forces as this is going on and like we're nowhere near being able to simulate that yeah my favorite example here actually is i also do a lot of mechanical engineering of course because we're making robots right sure and if i have something simple as simple as i'm going to bolt two things together then i go and run a simulation on this on a small supercomputer overnight and what we're simulating is like 0.1 second of a load interaction on this bolt circle right right and then i still and test it in the lab, because it's probably not that accurate.

13:27So that's the actual accuracy we have of simulation. So if you want to simulate complex things, it doesn't work. But if you want to simulate relatively simple things, it works really well. And that's what we leverage currently in reinforcement learning. So that means the robots can learn to sit, to squat, to run, to walk, to support its own body in a good manner. It can also learn some dexterity for like simple objects. So like, how do you pick up all kinds of different shapes and handle them with like in-hand dexterity? Here's extremely powerful because you can do this completely autonomously with no people involved.

13:58But in the end to do this, you now have to move to the next paradigm, which is how do you do the same thing in the real world? And that's something that I'm very interested in these days and we're working a lot on, which is learning in the real world. Yeah. And also with RL. So I call this kind of like broadly learning from failure. Okay. And what it is, is you have a model which involves a good amount of reinforcement learning in the bottom to learn how to handle its own dynamics. Then you have some expert demonstrations from humans, which is typically teleoperation data. You, of course, also have all of the internet because that's how you get a better understanding of a lot of things around us.

14:34And the data is there. And then this allows you to get to where you have a task that is non-zero in success, right? So you tell the robot to do something and the robot is able to sometimes succeed. And at this point, you can actually close the loop and you can say like, hey, now I only need to know whether it succeeded or failed, which is a way simpler problem. and then the robot can learn. But again, this requires you to have a robot that can fail and can fail graciously. And once you can do that, you can just think about it, right? A robot opening the fridge and it's like, it slips on the handle, tries again, but oh, it moved a bit because the fridge is stuck in vacuum.

15:09So like it had to like shuffle, it feeds the feet a bit to not fall over. And like it grabs again and like, oh, there I opened the fridge. So now you have two examples of what not to do and one example of what to do. And as you keep iterating on this, you can kind of like self-improve the system, which is incredibly interesting because teleoperation does not scale. Teleoperation is extremely interesting to bootstrap your way into non-serial chance of success, but you're not going to be teleoperating millions of robots. So it is just a tool. I think it has a bad reputation. Everyone's always saying like, oh, is it teleoperated?

15:40Is it AI? And I understand that because it's interesting to see how far have we managed to push the AI. But I actually look at it the other way around. If you can teleoperate it, we can do it with AI. That's just a question of data. And what really is exciting about this is how can you take all of that data and create this data flywheel that just keeps running. And my dream, of course, right, is that you could come back in a million years and the system is just better. Right, right. And we're not quite there yet, but like that's where it needs to go. I want to shift gears a little bit and ask you kind of about the societal aspects of robotics and humanoid robotics.

16:14There's been, I mean, even going back a couple of years when LLMs and, you know, LLM chatbots came out and everybody started talking about, well, what does this mean for work? What does this mean for my job as a writer or an accountant or a lawyer or what have you? How do you think about humanoid robots from the human perspective, right? Because we've been talking about how the robots learn and how important it is for them to be out in society, picking up those nuances. What's been your experience and how do you think about how humans react to humanoids and specifically in the context of work, where robots are coming in.

16:45And, you know, depending on the job, the situation, I would imagine there's a range of reactions from folks. But there's got to be a little trepidation, right? Yeah, yeah. So let me start with what we're actually doing, right? Yeah. So right now, 2025 for us is about consumer. And there's going to be a lot of people this year with NEOs in their homes. And I can't wait to give people back 2.3 hours, roughly. That's the average of work you do at home every day to just keep your house tidy and like all of the chores around the home. Which people generally do not want to do, right? You're finally home from work and you'd like to spend time with your family and now you need to do the laundry.

17:19So there we're not so far at least meeting any challenges. That's mainly people being very happy. But it points to a broader thing in society, right? Which is what do we actually want to spend our time on? What makes us happy? And I think, first of all, we need to ensure that we can keep the standard of living we currently have and preferably grow it right yes and we're having this enormous shortage of worker coming because we're not having enough kids right i think it's going to be a long time until we kind of run out of things to do even if we change nothing yeah but i think also it's a great opportunity for us to be able to focus on really what matters and like what makes us human right so i have this personal experience on this many years ago it was back early in college and i had a job just going from house to house for elderly and cleaning okay this is a side gig and so many of the people i came to they'd already cleaned even though like they were very old and frail because this was their 20 minutes a week where they got someone to talk to them right so they would just like have coffee and chocolate ready and like hey sit down and talk with me instead yeah i mean it's obvious that that job should have been done by a machine so that people could spend time on interpersonal things right right and this is just one example of how i think like how we view the value of humans will change throughout society once we start moving towards an actual true abundance of labor right because that is what we're talking about here we're talking about the same kind of shift that we saw with electricity a couple hundred years ago where you move from this is just never going to like humanity is never going to master energy right that sounds like implausible to like you flip the light switch in the morning and you're annoyed if there's no light right the same is going to happen with labor but i think it is really going to enable us to reassess what makes us human and what makes us valuable and i don't think it is basically reducing people in quote to robots in like repeating certain labor so that we can get products and goods and services and i think so far up through history we have never run out of human creativity.

19:24I think it's Jensen who says this, right? It's a good way of saying it. We will find new ways to do or new things to do and how to add value to each other. And I think there will be higher value than what we have today. But always when this happens, of course, there's a transition period and that transition period can be painful. And I think that's a big one that we as a society need to discuss and come up with good solutions to because any kind of like large technological shift will mean that people need to change. You need to adapt. You need to adapt. But yeah, that's a good word. When is NIO shipping?

19:55You mentioned NIOs being out in people's homes, doing the labor. I'm going to be kind to my team and not say exactly when it's shipping, but it is shipping this year. To share. And so when you talk about, can you talk about the things that NIO will be able to do in homes? Sure. So, I mean, I can go through the things that we're doing right now. Yeah, great. To be very concrete. And then I can talk about what we plan to do. Perfect. So today what works really well is vacuuming. and you can see that if you go to TTC to our booth you can see the robot vacuuming. It's actually very good because you can move things around etc.

20:28It can tidy it can do the laundry It can fold It can fold not everything 100 % yet but we're getting there. I'm pretty confident we can do a good job on that. Folding is one of these very interesting things by the way where when you let me first preface this everything I talk about now are things that we are doing partly with AI and partly with teleop and the plan is to make it autonomous, but we're going to do that together with you guys as customers. And I want to talk about that. Okay. But this is basically what is the platform capable of doing, right? And folding is just this very interesting thing that in classical robotics is almost impossible to solve because it's like a deformable object that every time you put the shirt down, it looks completely different.

21:10Right. And for some reason, this just works with AI. It's actually not so hard to automate folding. And I can't actually tell you why. I'm not quite sure. But like, that's one of the things we found out pretty early that like, you know what, it actually works really well to automate. Amazing, yeah. Yeah, but it is classically seen as extremely hard. Right, folding today, common cold tomorrow. Yeah, so, but then of course, I'm also very excited about just like having something around the house that you can interact with and I can help with small things. I had this magical experience the other day in my home where I was just sitting there.

21:43I was actually a candidate for a job coming over in my house. And we were just sitting there talking. And the robot is going around doing his things, right? So it's like wiping the counter, I think, at this point. And then my food comes, and I just tell the robot, like, hey, Neo, can you get the door? That's my food. And Neo goes over and opens the door, gets the food package from the delivery guy, who was kind of shocked, and then goes over and puts it on the counter for me, right? And you could say, like, that's not that valuable. is kind of gimmicky, but the sum of all of these things is extremely valuable.

22:18So I'm also very excited to see how people will use it because I think this will evolve over time. And we can talk about like the canonical tasks like laundry, vacuuming, cleaning, tidying, like these kind of things. And they're all there, but yeah. Yeah. No, I was thinking to your point earlier though that during this, when the robot's cleaning the counter and it goes against the food, you don't have to break your conversation with the candidate, right? You're spending that time as you were saying, well, what's really important to us? I want to connect with this person and see, are we going to work together?

22:46Do we have things in common, et cetera? Yeah, that's fantastic. And it also points to how almost everything we do that is physical labor is social. Whenever you do something, you are kind of also navigating a social situation. Even if I just say, hey, Neo, can you get me a Coke in the fridge? Maybe someone's in the kitchen making food, right? So you're navigating this social situation to do this. And this is not just through in the home. It is also through all out through enterprise, right? Right. Whether you're in like a retail or a hotel or even most factories, there's a lot of people. There's other people.

23:15Sure. So this is why the home and consumer has to happen first before we go into all of these other markets. Right. But back to how this works, where I think it's quite important, is that if you are one of the people who buy, and I hope you will, right, buys a NIO in 2025, we are selling almost more a journey than a destination. So it'll be, do you want to be one of the first ones to ever have this at home? it's going to be a transformational product right and it's something at least me and i know many others have dreamt of all their life yeah and you get to be part of this journey together with us right where we develop this towards an actual abundance of labor and not everything will work day one but it will get better every day it's going to be a lot of fun and we're going to treat you really well and we're going to respect your privacy and we can talk about that too i think that's a big topic and really make this into a journey that you will never forget and it's almost like adopt an EO, right?

24:07And I'm not saying it's not going to be useful because it's already very useful. So it will be useful and it will reduce the amount of work you do in your home every day. But it's not going to do everything for you, right? That's not day one. And some will be autonomous, some will be tele-op, and sometimes it'll fail. And that's something you have to be okay with. And I think expectation management here is extremely important, right? Because we cannot do this alone. We have to do this together with all of you out there and kind of collaborate, right? On how do we teach these robots how to behave in society?

24:41Are there things that the end user, and I'm thinking of the consumer setting, will be able to do to sort of intentionally try to teach the robot things, as opposed to, you know, just interacting with the robots learning? But like, will the user have the ability, I don't know, almost like a, I was going to say like a dev kit, but that's not quite right. No, I get what you mean. Let's say, to be very specific, right? can our customers fine-tune models okay perfect what's it most likely the answer to that is yes okay we have some stuff that we're very proud of on that and um we'll see when we roll it out okay i think it's going to be incredibly important to enable people to use this general robot kind of almost in any manner you want right sure because the creativity of the community is going to far outweigh like the creativity of the company right and just putting it into a few homes We've learned so much.

25:31Yeah, I can only imagine that. Maybe if we're very good, like half of our assumptions are correct. The other half is just completely wrong. And that's just the way it is, right? And then you iterate. Before we wrap up, I want to ask you about the world model challenge. And maybe you can speak a little bit about the importance of world models when it comes to robotics and robots learning. Yes. So this one is a bit harder. So, you know, when we talk about AI, it's very easy to explain like, Like, hey, the robot learns something through demonstration. Then it learns something that keeps improving it through RL.