Posted by denysvitali 10/28/2025
Mind blowing.
Point being, we might be at an iPhone-like pivotal moment for home robots.
If you showed a 1980s EE any component taken from the Neo, it'd look like science fiction. Some of the least sophisticated parts (motors & batteries) are still an order of magnitude better than anything available 40 years ago; the most sophisticated (processors, memory, camera sensors) are at least six orders of magnitude better. The Pentagon of the 1980s would have fought a small war to get their hands on a few of the MEMS IMU chips that we put in video game controllers.
The irony and complete disconnection from the reality of 99% of people is quite mind blowing indeed
The last few years of tech have been full of keynotes with AI that can make art, AI that can send heartfelt messages for you, AI to make music, etc - All things people actually like to do and want to do.
This is a $500/mo robot that can do household chores so you don’t have to. Many people in America (estimated >10%) spend a few hundred a month already on actually hiring cleaners to visit their house and clean biweekly. This is cost-comparable and a task no one wants to spend time on.
This is a luxury, but it’s a top-25th percentile luxury not top 0.1%.
> This is cost-comparable and a task no one wants to spend time on.
It's a robot that will be mostly remote controlled by a wage slave to pick up your dirty socks, this is black mirror tier, not startrek tier.
I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great.
And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.
Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to:
* Tidy up.
* Clean
* Do laundry
* Help with other stuff
Seems well worth $500/mo. I don't expect that V1 of this technology will be able to effectively do all that stuff, but I'm hopeful that v2 or v5 might be able to.
On a related note, "folding laundry" seems to be a really hard challenge for machine learning to solve. Solutions like "Foldimate" kind of work if you individually hand it every piece in the right way - but nothing seems to be cable of having a human dump a bin of washed clothes in and spitting out nicely folded laundry. And everything so far that's promised to do that seems to be vaporware.
Maybe, but you should factor in that many chores can't be done at all, and those that can be done will take ~10x as long.
Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.
A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.
1. Remote teleop with transfer learning
2. Quiet operation (nobody else is doing this)
3. Pulley based hands
For that price, absolutely
Plus I have epilepsy and live alone so this might just save my life
Imagine being a kid and waking up to this sitting in your room, silently watching you sleep.
Imagine how terrified your dog is going to be of this thing, shuffling around or getting stuck with its foot on the edge of a rug.
Imagine finding it going through your underwear drawer when you come home from work early.
Man makes up stories. Scares himself.
Some people make jokes, and then the rest don't get the joke so they think it's real and go along with the meme out of wanting to fit in. Eventually, the neurotic find everything scary and dangerous. Everyone else just skips over this nonsense while you guys self-reinforce. Social media's worst effect.
* Water Plants
* Turn off lights
* Get the door
* clean up trash
* Load/Empty dishwasher
* Tidy House
* Laundry
* Bartend Party
* Feed Pets
* Play music as the most over engineered Bluetooth speaker
In other words, nothing very labor/skill intensive yet.
And if you let your robot feed your pets, they will eventually love the robot more than you. I suppose that's the last activity you'd want to hand over to an inanimate object.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132260 ("Neo Gamma (Home Humanoid) (1x.tech)"—48 comments)
Small and medium-sized businesses will start thinking that it's much better to lease a unit for $500/mo. than $2,000/mo. in payroll for one human. Then they own the unit after 3 years. We're going to need some form of UBI soon.
The total addressable market for giant fighting robots on the other hand...
I think that it's hilarious (in a grim way) that we got this thing : a 30kg robot with no proven reliability performing dynamic/active balancing at all times and everyone jumps to the fear of 'The Scary Foreigner' rather than the fact that this actively power-damp'd mass is actively trying to fall backwards or forwards, being held together by whatever control loop, onto your toddler or pet.
A single non-redundant power-failure is orders of a scarier proposition to me than a foreigner with a bad attitude : you can fix that with management and action auditing , more than a single person in the loop, etc. You can't fix the future awaiting technical failure.
We still haven't fixed bad technicals in any industry yet -- we occasional get bad planes delivered to customers. We have technical failures in pacemakers.
For purpose of this discussion I'm ignoring ethics (other than slaves and there I resorted to legal concerns to sidestep the issue) - If it was possible for me to get an affordable human in my house I would no longer be able to ignore those issues.