NEO Humanoid Robot: Revolutionary AI Assistant or Overhyped Pre-Order?

Okay, we have to have a conversation about this. I feel like it's been a minute since I've done just like an old

school straight to camera rant video, but this has been all over my timeline lately, so I feel like I feel like I

have to. So, meet Neo. Potentially the most futuristic product we've ever seen. This thing is a full-fledged humanoid

robot. 5 foot 6, 66 lb, 4 hour battery life, self-charging, and it lives in your house. It's finally here. Get your

mind out of the gutter. It's for doing chores. It's a housekeeper. It has the same dexterity as a human because it's

shaped just like a human. Walks around on two legs. Has 10 fingers. It can fold laundry and put it away for you. Or it

can do the dishes for you from start to finish and then put everything away. It can go around and water the plants

outside or inside on a perfect schedule and it never forgets a single plant. And then it'll go around and vacuum and tidy

up the house if anything gets left out. It always knows where everything is. It can find the TV remote and it'll

basically actively do all the chores that you know you have to do, but you don't actually want to do. And when it's

done, it goes back to its little docking spot and charges itself. Imagine going out for the day of work and coming back

a few hours later and everything's done. All the chores are finished every single time, every day. You never have to do

chores again. That's amazing. Or maybe, let's say, you have mobility issues. This thing can sort of act as a personal

assistant in a lot of ways. These are things that represent massive value for a lot of people. And it's available to

order now. This this is available to order. This feels like it could be the best tech announcement of all time in

2025. Except this isn't real. And I mean that in the most literal way possible. This is not

real. First of all, it's a pre-order. So, you can go to this website right now and you can pick between three colors

and then it's either $500 bucks a month subscription for a standard delivery or you can pay a flat $20,000 to own it

outright and get priority delivery. Just drop a $200 fully refundable deposit to get in line today. And deliveries in the

US start sometime next year. And that's just allegedly. We don't know when it's actually going to ship. Now, to be

clear, it's not actually the price that I have a big problem with. Like, I know these numbers seem eye popping on paper,

but this is a first generation bleeding edge humanoid robot assistant. Like, I never thought that this would be cheap.

And also, there isn't really competition yet. So, you got to imagine the target audience is going to be people whose

time is worth more than the money they're spending on it. Like this is for people who the idea of saving a few

hours on chores every week so that they can use that time to make more money actually makes logical sense. Like

people really think like that. It's for early adopters. It's it's for people who want to spend however much they think

it's worth on this brand new novel thing. That's fine. But my issue with this product is the gap between what

it's actually capable of today and what they're promising as they take your money today. Like I think when people

watch a video like this, they expect that this robot has some sort of built-in artificial intelligence that

allows it to recognize objects and navigate around on its own and learn your house and be productive for those

hours while you're gone. And that I think would be a reasonable thing to get out of watching that video because

that's what it's designed to show. That's what you're supposed to feel. That's the dream. But that's not

actually what's happening. So Joanna Stern, the legend, she did a video with this Neo robot also this week where the

company showed her all the things that it could do. And turns out 100% of the things that they showed her were

remotely controlled by a human in another room wearing a VR headset with controllers. That's not exaggerating.

100% of the stuff they showed her. The carrying things around, the loading up the dishwasher. I mean, look at this

thing. [Music] Yeah. All of this is tea operated. And

this was a demo set up by this 1x company. So, this is like best case scenario stuff. And I see a lot of

people defending this robot online like, "Oh, you know, no, there's probably other things that it can do

autonomously. They just didn't show her yet." Really? You You don't think they would show her

the best stuff that this could do autonomously to keep selling the dream? If you watch that keynote video back, to

their credit, you'll notice that they actually are very careful to label exactly when the robot is doing

something autonomously and not teaoperated. And in that whole nearly 10-minute video, there's exactly two

scenes that have this label. There's the get the door command. >> Get the door, please.

>> Where the robot walks over to the door because someone's coming up. It grabs the handle, waits for the guest, and

then sort of pulls the door open and fumbles backwards a little bit, kind of like a toddler to let them inside. And

then there's the put away the dishes command where the robot totles over to the person, recognizes the harmless not

glass empty cup in its hand, grabs it, and then walks away with it. Cool. No, seriously, that's actually pretty

impressive. Even if I could already today unlock the door with my Google Home and a smart lock, which is my

voice, there is something at least a little bit futuristic about a humanoid robot going to do that. That's part of

the dream. It's doing it autonomously. But then that also means that everything else happening in this video and

everything else we've ever seen this Neo robot do, we can safely assume is remote controlled. So the gap between what this

product can actually do today and what it can maybe hopefully do someday in the ideal future are it is massive. They are

massively far apart. And so that that's really my main issue. There seems to be a bit of a lost art in waiting for a

tech product to be actually finished before announcing and unveiling it. Like, do you remember when tech

companies would unveil a brand new tech product that they've been working on and then do a demo and then the next slide

was like, "This thing is going on sale tomorrow or next week or something like that." And that hype would carry right

into the buying cycle. You remember that? That was sick. But now in this age of all these AI products, it's like

there's this thing where you end up selling the dream before you sell the actual product. And that is dangerous.

Like the promise of AI is so huge and so massive and magnificent and awesome, but is also so clearly not done yet that you

end up with stuff like the humane pin or even the rabbit R1 for example or heck even Apple intelligence where you have

these big promises but the capabilities are still over here while the promise is all the way over here. And I'm trying to

figure out why they do that. And I think really there's two main reasons. And believe it or not, I think Tesla

self-driving is a really perfect parallel example for a lot of this stuff. See, basically, in order for this

robot to be everything people want it to be, they need to develop a super smart AI system that looks through the robot's

sensors and is able to learn its environment and recognize everything it's looking at and teach itself to

navigate that environment and perform tasks. It has to learn what a laundry room is and what the laundry looks like

and how to fold each type of clothing. And it needs to learn what cups and forks and glasses are and how to pick

them up. And it has to be adaptable to all these different sizes and shapes and materials and things of all these

household objects so that when the user asks for it to do something just like, "Hey, Neo, vacuum the living room when

I'm gone or something like that." Then Neo can go, "Okay, I know where the living room is. I know where the vacuum

is. I know how to use the vacuum, where the handle's at, like how much battery life I have, how much I need to vacuum

the whole living room. I know not to knock over lamps or certain objects in there. And even the laundry folding

thing, like just that requires a ton of training data or at least some way to understand all these different shapes of

shirts and jackets and hoods and vests and all sorts of things and hooks and and hangers and what gets folded, what

gets dry cleananed, all these different things. And the list just goes on and on. And like what if one of the tasks is

going and and getting the right medication for an elderly person, bringing it to them that it it has to

get that right. Like it needs to identify the correct medication at the right time and the right intervals and

bringing it to them. Like that that is one of a ton of household objects that it has to specifically get really good

at. Now, in the self-driving car world, no matter what you think of them, Tesla's definitely a leader here, and

they've had a pretty clever approach to trying to work on this problem because their problem is their robots on wheels

need to learn all these possible variations and ways to navigate situations that could happen on the road

and how to get around them. Traffic cones, construction zones, weird lane markings, etc., etc. So with their

millions of cars already on the road, they have slowly, very slowly let people turn on this beta self-driving feature

in small stages in their cars while instructing people to keep their hands on their wheel, of course, so that they

can slowly start to gather information from people willing to beta test. And so those cars will encounter and navigate

all sorts of situations for the first time and then the second time and then the fifth time and then the hundth time.

And all this data can go back into the system to help all these cars learn and get better. And now at this point, this

is like their primary advantage is they have millions and millions of miles of training data from people essentially

beta testing for Tesla. It's a robotics challenge. It's an AI challenge, but yeah, they're essentially using early

adopters to beta test to make the systems better for the eventual masses. And now this this home AI robot

challenge is essentially the same thing, but in people's homes, which is potentially way more variables like cars

have to stick to what's on the road and and mostly are operating in a 2D plane. Well, there's obviously different story.

People's houses are crazy different shapes and there's all sorts of objects and different shapes and types of them

and a million different variables just with household objects. And maybe you could argue that the stakes of

self-driving cars are a little higher because of all the safety risks and, you know, if it messes up, someone could

die. Maybe that doesn't happen as often with the home AI robot, but then again, if it

gets someone's medication wrong, you know, it's still pretty important. So, I think the point here is you don't get to

make this awesome, perfect home robot without all of this information. And so, they need the training data. And so,

they go right back to early adopters. So, people who press that order now button first and who actually, I guess,

get one of these when they start to ship them will get a robot that can probably do a few simple things autonomously,

like opening doors. But there will be many things it can't do. And for that, if you scroll down on their website, you

can see there's expert mode, which is when you have something the robot can't yet do, and you schedule one of their

teleaoperating employees to look through the sensors into your home and do the task so that the robot can learn from

it. And this is something that they've direct pretty directly said that they expect early adopters to be totally cool

with. Like, go watch Joanna's video. I'll link it below the like button. He basically grills the CEO about all this

stuff and he's kind of just like, yeah, you know, if you want to be on the bleeding edge of this, like, you know,

we'll probably blur faces and maybe let you geo fence certain areas of your house, but yeah, that'll be one of the

things that they allow you to do. So, look, there are certain industries where pre-ordering something that's not

finished yet is actually normal behavior. Like, this happens all the time with smartphones now. This happens

in video games. It even happens a bit with cars these days, although sometimes that can even go too far. But now with

all these AI products coming out now, it's resulted so many more times in this strategy. They feel like they have to

announce the product way before it's done and they they end up putting out this thing that is just nowhere near the

dream. And that's how you get, you know, we talked about the humane pin. Doesn't that sound familiar? like getting

announced with such a high potential ceiling and promising that this could maybe be a post smartphone world type of

gadget, but it was just absolutely not good when it came out and not enough people were willing to beta test

something with that miserable of an experience. And then the Rabbit R1, like I said, that's another one. you know,

they are surviving and they're improving, but absolutely with those early adopters. But a $20,000

5 foot6 humanoid that wanders around your house and does chores, like are there really that many people you think

that are willing to spend that amount of money and know that they're going to have to potentially give up some pretty

serious privacy and are basically going to be a beta tester for some unknown number of years to hopefully maybe

someday achieve that dream? Some of those people are out there, but is there enough of those people? You

know, I don't know. I I clearly don't know, and I think a lot of other people don't know. There are obviously a lot of

potential downsides to this robot. You know, it's too small and weak to carry anything super heavy. It's also too slow

and a bit too clumsy, it looks like, to do anything really serious, and it requires inviting a ton of remote

viewable cameras and microphones into your house. And it could also fall over and have a hard time getting up. And

also, just like the self-driving car, there are a number of situations where the robot getting enough things wrong

could be dangerous. Like even like just the medication stuff that I talked about earlier, or even it just clumsily

dropping something made of glass or any other various potentially dangerous household situations. And also, I'm not

even sure it has to be human- shaped, but that's another argument for another video. But the upside clearly is the

dream. like Rosie the robot from the Jetsons type of dream. A personal assistant that seamlessly goes around

your house and quietly does all the stuff that you don't want to do and does it better and faster as time goes on and

does it in quiet hours of the night. The point is this is the new AI promise problem that we have. It's it's not just

this product and this company. This is, you know, the most visible one on all our timelines right now. But it's like

all these AI products are promising the world way before they have a product that's ready to actually show anyone and

take money for it. And and theoretically, this is what we want AI to do, right? It's not just like AI

generated videos and slop and random copyright infringement. Like we want it to be doing actually useful, productive

stuff. That's not the issue. It's just the gap. The gap that's the issue. And closing that gap is so so hard. And and

you know this is one of the obvious examples like the people that would benefit most from the ideal version of

this robot like the elderly or people with disabilities are the least likely to become early adopters. So it's tough.

I can actually applaud them for showing everything that they did to Joanna in that video. Uh, fun fact, they actually

reached out to me 10 months ago in January from a random Gmail address offering to do a sponsored video. I

didn't respond. I didn't think it was anywhere close to real or worth doing a video or talking about, but we'll see

how this ages. Like, we might look back at this in 12 months and every everyone everywhere is shipping great AI products

and humanoid robots and it's all a dream and I look like an idiot. In which case, great, we made it through that gap

somehow. Uh, but history seems to be suggesting that I'll probably be right about this one, at least for now. But

hey, subscribe to see me in my words if I'm wrong. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one. Peace.