#51 - Bernt Bornich, Founder & CEO of 1X

0:28I had the first robot we have at home. So you grew up in Norway, and I know that you're basically trying to design something that is like a humanoid that's incredibly comfortable to live with and pleasant to be around. And I'm kind of wondering from your background, did that have any influence on how you're thinking about designing the product now? Maybe. I mean, Scandinavia is known for beautiful design, right? Yeah. I think a lot of it also has to do with just like growing up, being so passionate about the space and like thinking about it always as I was a kid. All I wanted to do was build humanoid robots, reading a lot of the sci-fi, watching a lot of the movies, and kind of realizing that this hard, dark sci-fi future is not what everyone wants.

1:10It's kind of like a cheat code. If you want something to look really cool, just make it dark sci-fi. And it's like, that's not really what people want. Like selling controversy. Yeah, it is. And it's like, we want something that's like relatable and like soft part of our space something that kind of redefines how do we communicate with these artificial entities or intelligences and in like your day-to-day when you're thinking about how to design this thing what does that actually look like in practice there's a lot of meetings and trying to just ensure consistency across like the into our product.

1:53I mean, I wear many hats, but one of them is product visionary. And that's a lot of just saying, no, no, that doesn't work. I get it's hard, but we can't do that. We have to find a better solution. And not making compromises on these core principles, right? Like the robot has to be safe, has to be actually capable. It's not a toy. And it needs to be very affordable to actually have the reach that we need. And just living with the product, ensuring that I'm with the product every day, using the product in my own home and just seeing the output, right? Because in the end, like, the health of your organization is always seen in the product.

2:33And then you're trying to skip level as much as you can every single day to catch things earlier than that. So you're not sitting in your living room and asking Neo to open the door and you're like, holy shit, what happened here? Like, why is the glass broken? Yeah. So like that's that that's a lot of the day to day and then I mean there's a lot of this because we want to make sure we have very passionate Early adopters that want to be on this journey together with us So I think it's quite important to get the messaging out there like I think we have a quite novel but also very friendly view on like how the world can be and We need to share it with people so we can kind of build that following that will help us make this a reality and of course ensuring we have money to pay all these people and then balancing all balancing all these but like my heart and passion belongs in the engineering and the product right that that's where i'm coming from has there been any moments where you're you know you actually have it in your home um where you kind of experience some delightful thing that you you would not have expected to be a delight a lot of times um there's been a lot of magic around small things they just like you don't it's not that i didn't expect it it's what i didn't expect it to be that magical like sitting in the couch reading a book someone knocks on my door and say hey neil can you get that the robot goes over opens the door and says hi to the guest right it's like fully autonomous and it's absolutely magical is it also partially magical that it's magical for the other person that's experiencing it.

4:08Yeah, it's a shared experience, right? There are some things like that. The first time the robot sat down next to me on the couch and we were having a conversation with the robot, and it's sitting down next to me, and it just dawns on me how incredibly different the conversation is from standing. Like, it completely shifts the perspective of the entire interaction. I'm like, holy shit, that's so different. When it's standing, you're just asking it for stuff. And when it's sitting behind it's sitting. No, no, we can stand and have a conversation, right? on like we are having a conversation now if we were standing having this conversation then we sit down and continue the conversation kind of shifts the perspective shifts it's different and we're not used to this when we're talking to an ai we talk to our phone or whatever right so like there's the obvious things like okay you're talking to something that has an embodiment so it has body language it can look at you you can know who's talking all these things but that's obvious like everyone knows that right and that works really well and it's magical but the shift in perception once you kind of like sit next to each other instead of standing i've never kind of noticed it until it happened with a robot because i'd never done with a robot before and now i start noticing it with people right because like before it happened with the robot i never like called attention to it i'm like whoa like it's like an out of their kind of experience because i'd never seen it before.

5:29So that was a pretty big surprise. Do you notice that people form similar attachments? You know, before Roombas became a thing, most people wouldn't expect to form a really familial attachment or an animal attachment to a robot. But have you noticed that kind of happen or something similar to that happen when someone has a Neo in their home? Yeah, and way before Neo, right? We had this beautiful experience back in, this is back back in, I think, 2019? Yeah, I think so. Our previous humanoid, Eve, and we were doing some trials in health care. So we had an elderly care center, and we had someone have the robot for a while.

6:08And we want to fix it, and we're like, we're just going to change the robot. Because it's easier than fixing it. Just lobotomize? Yeah, like, no, we're just going to take this one. You're going to get a new one. It's like, no, no, no, you're going to take my robot. I don't want a new one. I want this one, right? It's like saying you can't have a better human. It's just Fred or George. Yeah, you can't just do that. That doesn't work. So this is a lot of these things. People anthropomorphize, right? Yeah. And I think it's in our nature, and it's quite important. It's a big thing of like... There's a completely different tangent here on how much the social context actually drives cognitive development, which I think is quite interesting.

6:45Do you want to go down that? Yes. but first just to say that you say pet i think it's quite interesting because what is neo it's not a pet but it's not a human it's something else right it's it's something that's something in between like it's like a companion that can be there throughout life and know like the good the bad and the ugly and like remember your entire history maybe shared family history and always be on your side and how you feel yeah i think that's to me that's that's just magical and like the the closest i come is to thinking about it like uh if you know in like calvin and hobbes it's kind of like my hobbes the toy tiger um but there's also a lot of unanswered questions here right like we don't know how this will this will pan out but it is going to be a lot of fun and it's going to be really interesting the social side cognitive intelligence there's a lot of development in intelligence that only happens to species that that share a habit and live together right solitary species do not have this same type of cognitive intelligence and also the context of everything not just the conversations we're having but just the context of of simple things like manipulation and practical tasks, it changes based on social context.

8:10Simple favorite example being like, is the coffee cup in front of me dirty? Or is it, you need a refill? Or do I keep it throughout the day? It's very hard to know. It has a very deep social context. And is it yours or someone else's? And usually I keep it throughout the day, so don't take my coffee cup, right? It's like it's all these nuances of life. And I'm really excited to start capturing all these nuances of human life and how they can help us build better intelligence. Do you have to think through, like in designing the robots today, if you are going to be putting them in people's homes and people are going to be forming these emotional bonds and attachments to them?

8:53Do you have to think through like many iterations into the future of what do I want this thing to look like? What do I want it to be, you know, at least the skeleton to look like so that if someone ever wants an upgrade It doesn't feel like you just completely ripped out the brain of this thing It's it gets weird because you know That there's this There's this this old kind of like philosophical problem right of like how many times can I change the head and the shaft of the axe and it's still the same axe and and we literally have this problem with the robot where like we defined like okay the head is the name of the robot and the serial number so you can change everything except for the head and it's still the same robot now actually what happens sometimes is something goes wrong and like you have the full robot but just change the head and they will refer to it as the same robot even even though you changed the head.

9:53And now it's just chaos, right? Because this is just internal service or whatever, right? It's like, no, it's that a robot. It's just like, no, no. So we ended up with having, we have this new concept now that we call the quantum serial number, which is the robot's quantum consciousness. And it's virtual. It's just actually, it's like no matter how much you change everything on the robot, it's still the same robot. Not sure if our users will be happy with it, but it's our current best bet. That's your best bet right now? Okay, interesting. What has it been like putting it in the first few people's homes?

10:26Like what have been the most surprising things? How hard it is? How hard it is? It's the real world. It's so freaking hard. Like it's... What's gone wrong? Everything. Like, I don't know. Everything, right? Like when I first got this at home and I, I mean, I had the first robot we have at home quite a while ago, a couple of years ago now. it was like getting another kid right who would get into trouble all the time and also we tried running it at night because a bit slow in the beginning like i wanted to reset my house so it's gonna do that while i'm sleeping and i like wake up to the strange noises at night and like what the heck is going on that'd be so scary if you're getting a glass of water and this thing just like you just see the light flash on yeah yeah so yeah there was a lot of uh a lot of fun experiences good memories um but you know the real world is really complicated uh and that's why it's so beautiful and that's why it's so important from a data point of view but it's going to be a long journey i i feel we're getting to now where like i'd say like the robots are they're genuinely useful and enjoyable if you're an early adopter a nerd like me and then it gets better every day and following that trajectory is very beautiful but it's not for everyone yet right it's it is very much for early adopters that want to be part of the kind of first wave that has this at home and gets to live with the technology and learn how that is but there's a real benefit to that also right like being the first adopters of these kind of like new novel zero to one technologies usually has huge benefits down the road because now you kind of like you see the world with different eyes and there's power to that so So I think we'll have a lot of very happy customers.

12:12But it's probably like a year or two until you just like buy it for your grandma because she just needs help. Yeah. When was the like inflection point in your mind when it actually like became useful in your home? It was very early. It's been more like because you don't need to do that much. just like tidying stuff putting it away doing some vacuuming putting stuff in the kitchen in dishwasher and just like that's nice and also like sitting down with my friends and playing board games and everyone's just like hey can you get me a cup of tea hey can you get get me a new coke hey can you like roll it goes on those stuff right like you can say like you don't need that but it's a lot of fun uh so um i was thinking like the the most basic version is like a pet rock and And then you start adding a little bit of fun.

13:04Like people have pet rocks. You add a little bit of functionality, and it vacuums for you. And then you add a little bit of functionality, and it gets you tea and vacuums for you. Yeah, but I think the bar is actually pretty low, as long as you don't over promise. It has to be expectation managed, right? What was hard was not that. What was hard is just the basic stuff, like reliability, user friendliness, all these kind of things and getting that right wi-fi wi-fi freaking wi-fi wi-fi was an issue wi-fi is still hard like wi-fi is almost harder than robotics right goodness okay how do you solve that oh good wi-fi good antennas make sure your robot has really good wi-fi make sure your customer has good wi-fi um not everything has to happen over wi-fi but the robot is significantly less intelligent if it cannot have access to a bigger model right interesting okay so all the safety critical stuff and like basic functionality runs on the robot but some decision making happens in the game and also if you want the robot to have someone intervene and take over and help you if there's some tasks that the robot isn't able to do quite yet uh autonomously and you you have some teleoperation then that requires wi-fi that's uh that's been uh that's what i'm saying like it's a it's a subtle stuff right it's like again it's the real world like you're in you're in your lab and you're like this works and you put it in the real world and it's just like oh man like there's a long way to go here um luckily we did that like already two years ago so we have quite a bit of experience with putting things in the real world and figuring it out yeah i find it so hilarious that like a wi-fi router is the difference between the thing working and not working when you spend you know all this time and energy in a lab and it like it should work and then the wi-fi is the issue you're still probably routinely struggling with uh video calls right i actually don't do video calls i pretty much just fly in and talk with the person if i want to go talk with someone okay so let's make sure neo does all the other things you don't have time to so you can travel here and have a good conversation yeah and i'll drive in my autonomous car um i can't wait for that by the way i am so excited for that driving is not something i enjoy it's so strange to me that uh like i think three million people die every year from car accidents and also like i thought i thought a long time ago about like the amount of cognitive you know energy that's gone towards driving when you just we don't need to like the like give back to humanity of just having cars drive on their own has got to be like billions of years i i really always kind of like i i like to very often see the world through like efficiency yeah um and that's also kind of like why i do robots right because i think we can create this beautiful future where everyone gets to focus on what they actually are passionate about and want to do, right?

15:52I like to say, like, I want to try to turn have to into want to. I think there's a lot of connection between that and happiness. And that means, like, the amount of inefficiency in society, like wasted time that no one seems to care about. Like, just simple things like infrastructure. Like you said, like, cars is one thing, but, like, if your train spent half the time since we're in California, right? the amount of productivity that could have given us. Right? You look around and you see a world of opportunity. Yeah, there's enough to do. So for people who are worried that when the robots come, there will be nothing to do anymore because the robots will do everything, I will be very happy when that happens.

16:38But I think it's going to be a long while. There's so much to do. Just look around. There's so much to do. We're not going to run out of stuff to do. And if you run out of stuff to do, find something you're really passionate about that makes sense to you to do even though you don't need to and then you'll be happy yeah it's very strange when people you know there's the i don't want you to take my job but then there's the same people that are like i don't like my job it's like it i think the the loss of something is so painful that the idea of loss is worse than the fact that you don't even enjoy it in the first place well i think also it's just like this desperate like human need that we all have to like belong and to have a purpose and like why do you get up in the morning right you get up in the morning because you're gonna do a lot of stuff that is meaningful to you and to others and the others part here is very important um and to a lot of people work is a sense of purpose and belonging so i do think that's important And I don't think that like in a future where we have a true abundance of labor, that people will find meaning in just having mojitos on the beach.

17:51I think people will need to have something that drives them. I just don't think that's tied to productivity and the need to do a specific thing to survive. I think we can be so much more. And I don't think we will run out of creativity, basically, which is running out of things to do. we will invent things to do that is meaningful to us. Yeah. And I mean, we do this all the time, right? We pay extra for a painting because it's made by a great painter. And even though my robot could paint a better picture, he wouldn't buy that instead. And I actually seriously, I think that in the future, I'll invite you to my home and I'll say like, hey, you want to see the plumbing?

18:30It's going to be this like beautiful plumbing. It's going to be like, this is like this guy, like this artist of like a plumber. Like a craftsman. craftsmen, proper craftsmen that did this plumbing. It's like freaking beautiful. This is not done by a robot. This is done by this guy. Like it's signed here, right? He did the plumbing. I don't think like these things are going to disappear because we have robots. At least that's not what has happened up till now in society. Your idea is kind of there's going to be a lot more like craft and thoughtfulness and small things in the world. Yeah. It's going to be a beautiful world.

19:00I love that. Yeah. So I know you started thinking about humanoids when you were like 11. and i just like i was thinking about robots and stuff too but for that specific thing how did you initially get turned on to it this is like years ago this is not like this is like pretty deep and like it's uh i wish i could say something here that makes sense uh but literally i remember when it happened i always loved building things by the way from before this also and i built often make electromechanical things like picking apart kitchen appliances that had motors or whatever, like putting it back together to build something.

19:39But I was looking at an excavator, just kind of like doing his thing, and I was like, I'm going to make humanoids. And it makes no sense. But from that point forward. So you're 11 and you're looking at an excavator and that's the difference? I decided to make humanoids. But like, I'm not sure about the... It is a robot, though. An excavator is a robot. It's useful in society. It's doing something that we all want, like do garden, house, whatever. It's creating real tangible value. It's creating real tangible value. It's moving something from somewhere else. Yeah. So, but it is the pinnacle of engineering, right?

20:14It is taking every single science and combining it into one product. We do everything from material science, both new ways of die casting aluminum to how to make the synthetic fibers that allows us to make these tendons in our robot, all the way up through like electromechanics motors sensors mechanics cameras compute firmware software ai foundation models product design psychology like it's every science coming together to create something beautiful and hopefully in the end even like it's been interesting to see like where does this go right can we create artificial life there's there's not like as someone who just loves building things and engineering like can there be anything more interesting like i think rockets are pretty high up there but they're pretty interesting but they're not as interesting right they're lacking some of these things they're not intelligent rockets are more of a means of transport yeah right it's a very fancy what should we call it fancy plane you know i think you started the company in like roughly 2014 under a different name and you basically are pounding away for this is like year 10 like this is one of the weird things about this company in particular is it's not just started two years ago and it's like all right let's grow as fast as possible or whatever um you've been going on this since like 2014 2015 um what was the initial like thought in your mind for i'm going to go tackle this specific thing well this is a very simple answer money uh in the sense that i always want to do this yeah but i'm not a believer in like you don't bootstrap humanoid robotics it's pretty capital intensive um i've been working on a lot of different systems up through the years and like i had no belief that this is something you can solve by reusing existing supply chain you have to go back to first principles and like every single thing in the robot you need to think from first principles.

22:17Like, how should you do this? And then you end up with, like, the motors don't exist, the gears don't exist, the sensors don't exist. Like, nothing exists. So you have to make it all from first principles. Actuators. Yeah, so basically the actuators, but also, like I said, the sensors. Often, like, it's very connected. So to make the actuators, you need to make a new type of electronics. And then you need to write the software for that new type of electronics because that doesn't exist. Now you need to invent the manufacturing for all these things because that doesn't exist. And that takes a bit longer than making an app.

22:54So although I've woken up many times for the last decade and thought, like, shit, why didn't we make an app? What brought you to that point in time when you would wake up and think about why didn't we build the app? We've been close to the edge sometimes. We've literally been on less than 48 hours of runway and things like that, but that's many years ago. Amazing. So we pulled through, though. And it's putting us in a very unique situation now, right? Because we're the company that actually did all the foundational research. And this allows us to build something that is very unique. While everyone else is kind of clobbering together like the classical things from classical robotics, and then basically putting four robot arms together and saying humanoid, we've actually really innovated on the core technology.

23:40And that's why NEO can be safe, right? Why it can be so lightweight, low energy, compliant and soft while still being more capable than the competitors? And why it can be so affordable? Because it's just from first principles from day one. How do you minimize material consumption, right? How do you ensure you're efficient? Need the smallest possible battery? How do you ensure you don't need any special alloys or materials? How do you ensure you don't need tight tolerances? How do you ensure it's manufacturable in few parts? and like not just doing that when you're designing the actual physical product but doing that when you're choosing the technical direction for how the product should even work right so you can't just do it afterwards you're that would be like saying i built this beautiful gasoline car over here now let's just make it electric no like that's a completely different car like now you need to start over so um i actually have to start from these first principles and I think that's been very good to us that we were able to do that very early and I think also able to foresee quite early what would be the most important things for this to have as big of an impact as possible and to me that's back to like that's to be safe right needs to be among people if it's not among people you're not going to have the data needed for intelligence also you're not going to be able to be gradually useful which is so important because you're not going to just wake up one day and then robots are going to be doing all blue-collar work.

25:07No, no. It's very similar to how the rest of AI field has moved. We didn't wake up one day and just suddenly, like, now all white-collar work is automated. No, we're all more productive because we're collaborating with this great tool and it's this beautiful symbiosis between man and machine. And humanoids will be no different, right? In the coming couple of years, it'll be gradually more and more useful and you'll get more stuff done because you have a humanoid. but it won't do everything for you. It'll do it together. And that means it needs to be safe. And like I said, it needs to be able to do the job, be capable.

25:40But then lastly, like the affordability thing. Is that the thing that you're most concerned about right now? Is just like getting the cost down to something where people are really like happy to adopt it? Now we're already there. I'm happy with that. I'd say like my main concern right now is more operational. Let's make sure we produce them with a very high quality and reliability. Let's make sure we communicate very clearly with our customers. Let's make sure we give everyone a very good customer experience. Happy customers, good relationships, operationally just excel. Get all the basics right, like security, privacy, safety, like, I mean, the part that's a product, right?

26:28Yeah. Yeah. For scaling up, like, I think I was watching Jason's video right before I came. And initially, when you were just talking with him, you were kind of talking about, I think you wanted to do like a million by 2027. 100 ,000. 100 ,000? And then like 2028? A million by 2028. Okay, there you go. What have been the biggest like operational challenges and like scaling up manufacturing and like hitting those kinds of numbers? And what do you expect to be the biggest difficulties in the future? It's just back to reliability, reliability, reliability. like i think we've done an incredible job in simplifying the system and making a humanoid that is very complicated in how capable it is but it's still quite simple that being said it is a humanoid and like back to like all science is coming together to create this beautiful thing one of the more complex things people have ever managed to make and now you need to make it reliable so all these systems and subsystems they all have to work at the same time and none of them can fail and then you're scaling manufacturing and you're bringing in like i mean we brought our factory up and running in hayward in four weeks when we got the building to be produced the first robot we hired like more than 40 people in one day right we had like a event where like come build robots with us and we hundreds of people lined up and we screened through and and onboarded people, and amazing people really showing up to help make this become the future.

27:59But also, that's a lot of new people in the same day. So how do you make sure your robot comes out on the other side still reliable? These things are like, in the grander things of researching how to create these embodied AIs and beautiful machines might seem simple, but these operational things are not simple. They're actually quite complicated. And I think there's a lot to do there. And then it's, of course, a race to get the AI to be good enough to make you super happy as a customer. There's a lot you can do with not that much AI also. Like your example of the gradually evolving rock here. But you're not probably that happy if it's still a rock in 2027.

28:38So there's a certain progress that's expected. I know the distribution of 3 % are super happy early adopters. And I mean, that's still a massive number of people. It is. which like it's way more than a million. But you can piss them off, right? Yeah. There's many examples of people doing that if you over promise. Like I think they're among the most picky users you can have because they're so knowledgeable. So like if you sell them something, it better be what you said it was. So it may just like pick up your coffee mug and open the door, but that's what you need to promise. Yeah, don't promise more.

29:10So are you constantly like trying to think through yourself, you know, you're trying to move really fast and increase capabilities, but you also want to like expectation set really? carefully i think it's very important um you have to dare to like think big and like believe that like we will solve this and we'll solve it pretty fast it's moving really fast and when you're living in that space every day and that's your job right being the evangelist is just like of course we can do this like we'll make it work right and now when you're talking to your customers you can't say the same thing there has to be a certain buffer because we think we can do a lot more than what we say we can do and we just want to make sure like worst case you're still happy best case you're blown away let's uh let's end it on like what are you most excited about in the next 12 months no doubt seeing more and more neos out into homes having the technology i worked on for a decade actually be useful to people and yeah can't wait to ship the first robots to what i'd call like our normal customers right so even though we have it in homes i wouldn't call it normal customers are you going to try to basically have every single one of your employees have a neo in their home just to have as much contact with the robot as possible not necessarily every single employee or too many um hopefully they will all buy one then they can have one but I do think like the bar should be if your employees don't want to buy one something's wrong I remember Brian Chesky had a thing where he would basically offer or he wanted the people that work to Airbnb to spend as much time staying at Airbnb is to go through the process of just like booking on their platform and stuff to try to understand what the customer experience was like and just predict pain points.

31:10Yeah. And it does make sense to subsidize this. Yeah. But I think even in that case, right, you should probably pay for the Airbnb. Yeah. Maybe you get a good, healthy discount to make sure you use Airbnb. But you're not really a customer experiencing the product unless you need to pay. It's an important part of it. You paid for it. Are you still happy?