NEO Robot Butler Mostly Teleoperated

1X Technologies’ household humanoid NEO — marketed as a $20K robot butler (or $499/month subscription) — is far less autonomous than its launch video implies, The Neuron newsletter reports. Tech reviewer MKBHD and a Wall Street Journal piece found that most polished demos were teleoperated: human operators in another room controlled the robot via VR, not on-board AI.

The WSJ coverage and MKBHD’s teardown highlighted that only two simple behaviors in the launch footage were claimed to be truly autonomous (opening a door and taking a cup). CEO Bernt Børnich told the WSJ early adopters agree to a “social contract” where remote operators help NEO and the company collects data to improve the AI; he said privacy measures (face blurring, user-approved no‑go zones) are planned but that data is needed to train the product.

The newsletter frames NEO as emblematic of a “sell the dream, build it later” trend in consumer AI hardware: realistic robot bodies exist, but reliable on-device intelligence does not yet. For now, NEO appears to be a high‑tech, human‑operated demo with some utility (the CEO said it saves him “about half an hour per day”) — and notable privacy and expectation risks for buyers.

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