This Week in Startups - This 22-Year-Old Built TikTok for Mobile Games, and It’s Growing Fast | E2276
Episode Date: April 15, 2026This Week In Startups is made possible by:LinkedIn Jobs - LinkedIn.com/twist Every.io - every.io Render - render.com/twistToday’s show:*Imagine scrolling through mobile games the way your flip throu...gh your TikTok feed. What if you could build your own game in 90 seconds and share it with the world? That’s what over 100,000 users are enjoying right now on Nanogram.On TWiST, we meet the co-founders: 22-year-old CEO Albert Brotherton and 24-year-old CTO Boris Radilov. They demo the app for us on the air, and Jason immediately spies the potential. Power users are playing 25+ games per session already.We’re digging into the co-founders future plans, including the potential for ads in your game feed, in this TWiST exclusive.PLUS domestic helper bots are here. NEO from 1X Technologies can do the laundry, open the door for guests, and even read and understand Post-It Note messages.Alex talks with CEO Bernt Børnich about building the safety-first 66-lb humanoid, why world models are so crucial for training robots in particular, and why homes are even tougher places for robots to navigate than factory floors.Timestamps:0:59 Nanogram co-creators Albert and Boris join the show3:42 Nanogram is TikTok for casual AI-generated games4:27 Building Nanogram with Google Gemini5:49 Draper and Associates: https://www.draper.vc6:11 Integrating ads into the game feed7:36 Roblox: https://www.roblox.com World of Warcraft: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com8:25 Building in New York9:07 Jason is obsessed with the Staples Baddie https://www.tiktok.com/@blivxx10:12 LinkedIn Jobs - Hire right, the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post at https://LinkedIn.com/twist20:36 Every.io - For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io21:40 1X CEO and founder Bernt Børnich joins the show https://x.com/BerntBornich22:31 Designing robots to actually live around people26:30 Teaching NEO about movement in the physical world29:00 TechCrunch coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/13/neo-humanoid-maker-1x-releases-world-model-to-help-bots-learn-what-they-see/29:58 Render: Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers.31:04 Moving beyond training data to true general intelligence33:17 Ensuring NEO pursues the safest possible path34:19 Why are world models so important?41:51 1X World Model Challenge on GitHub: https://github.com/1x-technologies/1xgpt45:14 Robots need to train on a lot of data… Where does it all come from?50:14 Manufacturing NEO from raw materials in San Carlos56:32 Robots building robotsSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com
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Welcome back to This Weekend Startup.
With me, Lon Harris. I'm Jason Calacanis.
This Week in Startups is brought to you by Render.
Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, render.
Go to render.com slash twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500 to $100,000 in free credits,
depending on your stage and backers.
Every.io.
For all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back-office
administration needs, visit every.
dot i.O and LinkedIn jobs. Higher right the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards
your job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist. We've got Albert Brotherton and Boris Radalov, Jason. They're
the co-creators of nanogram. I really like this. This is a cool thing. It's basically TikTok for
mobile video games. It's available right now. It's in the Google Play Store. It's in the iOS store. Guys,
thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having us, guys. So tell us what you're working on.
Yeah, Boris, do you want to kind of bring up the demo and walk them through it?
Yes, yes.
Just give me one second to get my screen.
Sure.
And this is, I have it on my phone, Jason.
This is, it's available now.
It's basically work.
It's like think TikTok, but people can create their own video games very quickly, like
casual mobile games.
And then you just scroll when you're tired of playing one, you just scroll up and you
go to the next game.
It's pretty remarkable.
Typical TikTok feed.
This is the MVP we put out a month and a half ago.
You're playing the game.
Yeah, boards.
And you're going to the next game.
You play this game, you get bored, you're going to the next one.
It's a very simple concept proving to be quite interesting.
But the whole brain raw maxing of playing multiple games in a row is just part of the flywheel.
The second half of the flywheel is the creation aspect.
When you're looking for a new game to play, it can be that complete like tyranny of choice,
like choice paralysis.
Like there's hundreds of games.
I don't have time to research every single video game.
This is just like, open your phone, start playing a game.
The creation is even cooler.
If you go on your Create tab, you put Create with AI, and you have all these templates, you could go off or you could do a custom template.
I'm just going to quickly demo something real quick for you.
So when I was like 14, I started programming because I wanted to make video games.
And you know now with AI and agents, something that would have taken me a week back then now takes 90 seconds.
So for example, if I want to make like a 3D version of Flappy Bird, all I have to do is go on 3D, write Flappy Bird, hit generate, and now it's going to cook.
up the game for me. And what's really cool is while you wait for the agent, you get to play other
games that other people have made for inspiration. And usually on the first prompt, it takes about
60 to 90 seconds to like one shot a full game. And after that, the cool part is that you're absolutely
free to remix it. I'm having a hard time playing and talking here at the same time. I have to
forgive my poor performance. But the idea is after that, you can remix the game as
many times as you want, and we'll just probably get that shortly. Additionally, you can remix
other people's games. So, for example, if I make like a really cool game, I send it to Jason here,
and he can remix it, change it in a way that he likes. So here is the 3D Flappy Bird that I made for
us. And this is very basic. This is like a starting point for us, and I get to play this. And as a little
kid, this would have taken me a few days to figure out before the age of AI. But interesting enough,
I can now do this in like 90 seconds and I can go prompted and I can say, hey, can you please add
guns to this? I like that you said please, very polite. So this is all just AI prompting to make
games. What's the engine behind it? We use this Claude or something or is this like some bespoke AI
engine to make games?
What we're doing is we've created a custom game engine, and then we're using Gemini
and a bunch of agentic harnesses and like tool calling to give it the ability to create
3D assets, create 2D assets out of like pixel art and things like this.
Basically, what we've created here is we're trying to rely on the native platforms as much
as possible, so we're really relying on Gemini to do the tool calling for us, and then we're
putting a bunch of tools such as like generate 3D mesh, generate 2D pixel art, generate sound,
things like this, and then it figures out how to call these, put it in the game, and do all sort
of stuff for the user.
Genius.
Can I take Lon's game and build off of it and fork it?
Yep, yep, yep.
This is the whole point.
It's like Lon can post like, you know, a flappy bird and you can say, I want to add guns
this.
You could send a picture.
I mean, at the moment we don't have.
Okay, so that's inherent in it as you just forked stuff.
It's like the remixing.
It's remixing, yeah.
Yeah, it's like the remixing on Sora, where I can see your video and I can say,
make them say this instead.
And it's just like everybody's idea builds on everybody else's idea.
Yeah.
What's the business model here?
And who are you two dudes?
So I'm Alva.
This is Boris.
I'm the CEO.
He's CTO.
And yeah, I mean, the business model is, I mean, look, at the end of the day, we're like a feed of interactive content, right?
That's like, I'm not even saying games because that's the direction we're moving in, right?
Interactive content.
And, you know, we have a lot of rev experiments we want to do, right?
Because this is a very new field.
We can't know exactly what it's going to.
be, right? But I think it's a very interesting space where, you know, there is no accessible
interactive ad space that's really easily distributed right now, right? So I'll use an example
here. So let's take like a big advertising provider like Domino's, right? And they want to,
you know, do some easy ad space stuff. They're going to go on short form content, right? And they'll
have a marketing team that's great at short form content. They'll post on Instagram and they'll post on
TikTok, right? But, you know, at the end of the day, interaction is much higher converting.
Right? And yeah, and it's engagement, so they're going to spend more time on it. So Dominoes can come in and say, I want to make an asteroid-like game where the boulders and the asteroids are dominoes. And when you break them apart, they turn into the pretzel bites. And then I want to have a spaceship go by that's the brownie, whatever it is, genius.
And make the pizza and the call to action can be order the exact pizza you've made in the game, for example. Yeah, very cool.
Albert and Boris, you guys went to school together. You're in high school right now? What's the story?
No, no, so I'm 22, Boris is 24.
We've worked together.
I'm glad I look so young, Jason.
I was referring to Albert, but okay.
No, joking.
You both are pretty young.
But so you're at a college.
Did you skip college?
You went to college?
I skipped college, personally.
Well done.
I went to college, unfortunately, and I went right during COVID.
University of Leeds, I studied computer science.
And, yeah, unfortunately, it was right during COVID.
So for the two of the three years, I literally just didn't go to classes.
So you paid a fortune and got nothing, got it?
Yep, yep.
That's ridiculous.
How much debt you got, Boris?
How much of debt?
Not much.
It's like 40, 50K in the UK.
It's quite cheap.
Not much.
$50,000.
Okay, we got to make this start at work.
I mean, compared to some of the people that, like, in the U.S.
where they're getting on, yeah.
All right.
Albert, what's your story?
You're the business guy?
You're a developer?
Who are you?
I'm the hustler.
I'm the business guy.
I'm the business guy.
I'm the hustler.
Yeah, I mean, I've kind of, I've been a gamer since I was six, by the way.
I'm like one of the weird people in Gen Z that plays a lot of World of Warcraft,
which is kind of like more of a millennial thing.
Wow, very old school.
Forrest is two, by the way, we play together.
But I've played since I was six.
Is that how you met?
Did you meet in World Warcraft?
No, we met through a childhood friend that kind of grew up with, you know, me and grew up with Forrest.
And he just introed us about three years ago, and we kind of kicked off and became best friends.
Got it.
And now you're sitting in a gamer chair, right?
That's a gamer chair in Alberta.
It's a razor one.
See, now this is what I'm like the Columbo of investors.
Like I look for a little.
clues and I'm like, hey, you're at the East lawn. I noticed Albert is sitting in a chair.
The chair is a gamer chair. And it's the brand razor. And I had a razor. My brother-in-law
had a razor mouse and it was used for playing games like World Warcraft. So you're very much into
gaming. Are you not, Albert? So you guys vibe coded all this. You did it. There you go.
And it has weights in it too. You can put different weights into it depending on the game you're playing.
What's your story? You guys are going to raise money for this. You want to come to an incubator.
You have raised money? You did go in an incubator? Have you incorporated? What's the story?
Here goes, this is a great idea.
Yeah, yeah, so we have raised money. I mean, it's a really exciting time for us. We've raised from
Drive. Awesome, fantastic. Well, and where are you based?
So we're based out of London and Sophia at the moment, but with plans to go towards New York, yeah.
Okay, great. My hometown. It's great. Just when you go there, please don't join ISIS.
Okay, so when you get to Dallas Island, they're going to be like, would you like to go to the
ISIS training camp or you like to go to Brooklyn or whatever it is?
Well, it's a bit like that in London, to be honest, too, so don't worry.
Yeah, you just have to defend yourself as young people against these ideologies.
Don't blow anything up.
Fantastic. New York's a play place for you because it's marketing in New York and people experiment.
And this could be permissionless.
So if you just tell brands, hey, you can just build whatever you want as a brand,
some young person at a brand, I don't know if you're watching the Staples Baddy.
Do you know about Staples Baddy?
No.
Lawn, do you know about Staples Baddy?
on TikTok. Okay, so one of our team, Jacob, will very quickly call it. I found it. I found it.
And Staples Batty. She basically is passionate about Staples. And she works at Staples.
She is like a batty in the internet slang. And she just talks about like, here's the best pen.
And she was talking about pens the other day. And I was looking for a new pen. And I don't
want to spend a dollar on a pen, but I don't want to spend $100 in a pen. And I was searching
for a pen and then she came up. And one of the pens that she liked was the Z
G750 that I literally bought it. Now, I didn't happen to buy it from Staples, but I did follow her,
so now I'm giving credit to Staples for it. Anyway, my point is she's getting more views,
and Lon probably has done a bunch of research on her right now. She's gotten more views and has done
more for the brand online than anybody in corporate who spent $10 million or $100 million
ever had because she connected with people authentically.
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She went through journals.
She went through pens.
Now she's getting picked up or whatever.
Now other people, Office Depot is trying to find their baddy.
It's become like a whole thing.
It's like the fast food burger thing that you were following that last week.
It's the same content.
The McDonald's CEO did a TikTok where he.
That was really bad.
He ate a burger, but he took a really small bite and it looks like he's disgusted by his own burgers.
And so now every other fast food.
CEO has done their own version where they love their burgers and they're eating stuff in their
face with them. And it really became like every single fast food CEO had to do one to get the
momentum from this viral McDonald's video. I think the problem with his video, because I did see it.
Yeah. And the problem was he's very robotic. Yes. He's almost like an MBA who's a bit on the
spectrum. I don't want to diagnose people. But when I say like he's robotic, you know, you get the
Yeah, it's not meant to.
He's awkward.
And it just, it's awkward.
He's not a good enough actor to pull off like, I really am enjoying this and I want to
eat this burger.
He's not even able to pull off.
He's a human.
No.
At one point, he goes, and this is going to be my lunch later.
And that's not a hard thing to convince me that you're going to eat a burger for lunch,
but I don't believe him.
He also in that moment, I don't believe him.
He referred to the burger as product.
Yeah.
It was like very awkward.
And he takes a very tiny bite.
He does not take a big bite.
I thought the same thing about the burger.
Burger King guy. Honestly, the Burger King guy did one. And I was like, he also doesn't really take like a big, like a man-sized bite like he loves burgers.
The question is who led them pose this? Like there was probably a whole marketing department there.
Yeah. Right. There wasn't a social media person there being like, can we can you take a bigger bite like you like your burger?
Because that's so dainty. It's like it's like it's like, yeah, he even shows it. It's like it doesn't look like bit into.
So clear, Albert, when you see this, that this person does not like their own product.
And that there is a, there is literally a salad that has been made to his specification by his chef off camera.
And he is going to spit out whatever he ate, swish his mouth with some Pellegrino at the exact temperature he wants.
And then he's going to eat that freaking salad that his chef made with that literally each item was weighed and put into his.
you know, a spreadsheet where he keeps his calorie count. What you need is somebody who actually
is sitting there with the chef saying, put more onions on and like, you know, the mustard ratio is off,
which is what the crock, which is what the McDonald's brothers were doing.
Albert, what's the vision here for the, oh, so anyway, back to the permission list. We're
talking about brands. I think you just let the brands do whatever they want on it. And then you
give them the ability to promote them. Yeah, which would be just,
what brands are doing now. Brands just make content. There's no permission to do that. And if they
get views and they do a good job, it gets views organically, but they can boost it. And they can pay to
boost. I think just paying to boost such a good idea. Then what about monetization from I'm the
creator? Could I put a game up there and say, if you want more levels, you can buy coins? Or is that
annoying to customers in against your philosophy, Albert? So again, this is a big rev experiment we want to do.
Like, look, there's two ways I look at it.
You can look at someone like Roblox, right, that's done incredible creator currency, right?
However, their games are 100% more long form, right?
Where you're not going to be playing like, you know, 100 games an hour, right?
Or more, right?
So, I mean, it's very normal to have microtransactions and, you know, a creator currency
where you as a creator can say, hey, look, I want to add an extra level, you know, it's clear.
I got a million plays on my game.
Let's add an extra level for my big supporters that want to do it, right?
This is something we want to experiment with.
So, yes, we're looking at experimenting with a creator currency, you know, because I think there's a big incentive there for creators, right?
So let's say you put a game up, right?
Short form, you made it in two minutes, right?
You did like three prompts and you get a million plays, right?
And just so we have a game in our minds that we all know, let's just say it's like Candy Crush and Candy Crush doesn't exist, right?
And you pioneered the first level.
I want that to be a big incentive for you to kind of, this is something you don't see in socials, you know, like iterate on that.
already posted thing, right? Unit of content. This is something you don't do in like Instagram
and TikTok. You know, the moment you like press post, that's it. You know, the ship sailed.
So I mean, there is an aspect that we want to test on this, but to be totally, to be totally frank,
we're too early, I think, to really know how that will go. And we are not the ones that can decide
if it will work or not on that. I think you spend the first literal two years just trying to
make the tools so good and so addictive that people get into it. I mean, I, it's, you know,
It's already kind of getting that. I mean, do you know anything about like our retention and like kind of anguaging?
Yeah.
Tell us a little bit about it.
Yeah.
Quite cool.
So we launched like mid-January and we've got about 100K users so far.
And 20% of them are what we call power users, right?
And these guys play more than 25 games per session.
And the average session time is around 21 minutes and they do two sessions a day.
So they're playing, you know, just under an hour a day and going through over 50 games.
And I think this is really cool because, I mean, you saw like a brief glimpse of the feed.
We don't have an algorithm, A, which is what drives most social engagement on platforms like
Instagram and TikTok.
Again, the point on algorithm, you know, I won't linger too long is never been introduced
to gaming before, right?
Drives most short-form social engagement, but never been down in gaming, right?
So we have really high session times for, you know, basically giving you slop, right?
That's what it is, you know, until it gets better.
And, you know, what we're seeing is kind of people are already really excited about it.
Yeah, I think this is going to be a breakout hit.
And how do you get the first couple of casual users?
Where do you find users for the product?
We started this with Discord, to be honest.
You know, we started a Discord community.
We had the idea in November.
We started a Discord, got it to like 10K people.
But as Discord is, not all 10K people were kind of super active, kind of like 2K of them were.
And these were like our test users.
And we had like a running beta of 200 people up until we launched in January.
And these guys loved it.
Like everyone that made games back then are still making games today.
So, you know, insane, you know, commitment to it.
And at the time, we didn't have like game generation.
They were like doing it on their own and, you know, uploading it.
But then, you know, a huge way, you know, and I won't really touch on ads because, I mean, ads are quite obvious way to get users.
But, you know, another really interesting thing is sharing games, right?
Like, I don't know.
You mentioned a lot about socials and sharing stuff.
Have you shared a Twitter, a tweet, you know?
Of course.
Yeah.
I mean, in the group chat, et cetera.
So that's going to be in high score.
and sharing, and then not to mention, if you have games that are a dual, so like Lon and I
could play versus each other, or we could invite each other to beat a score. So that's where,
like, the loop could happen, right? A hundred simple. A word-all type game. And then I send it to
Lon and say, look, I solved this in three out of five. Yeah. Can you try and beat it?
Well, yeah, I think it's really interesting because, like, look, I think the big point I'm trying to
make with this is it's not in our culture to share games, right? Like, you say, you share, you know,
reels. That's true.
But when was the last time you were playing a game?
Well, I will say there is one.
It's people will share clips of like specific kills in Call of Duty on YouTube, whatever.
That's like deep gamer culture.
But that's not casual.
That's still content.
That's still content.
And that's still super niche.
At the end of the day, like, you know, you will, if you are an avid Instagram user,
you will daily send reels.
I mean, this is a way of keeping in contact.
Like, I'm a middle child.
I have two brothers.
I send them reels every day and they send back, right?
Yes.
But games aren't something people share.
Right?
They don't.
So this is like one of two big questions we had before doing this.
So, by the way, we have the answers.
I think it's really interesting.
But these are one of two big questions we had before doing this was like, A, do people
want to share games?
Because they don't right now, right?
And B, will this shift look the same as the long form content, YouTube shift, to short form
content, Instagram, TikTok, right?
So the answer for the first one is yes, per 100 likes on the app right now.
Because we have likes and shares that you didn't see on Boris's beta version, because it's
a beta version that we're running right now.
But per 100 lakes, we're getting between 30 and 50 shares at the moment.
So huge amounts, nearly one in two.
And then when it comes to the long-form, short-form shift,
I've already told you, you know, the stats of we have 20% of our user base
going through 25 games per session in less than 25 minutes, right?
Around 21 minutes.
So, I mean, the big thing here that was like a huge sign for us was,
look, when you are talking about long-form content and before TikTok and Instagram,
there is a use case to spend three seconds on a video.
It's your camera role.
It's genius. The camera roll from iPhone, whatever Android has as well, right?
You can go watch three second clips that you've taken yourself or a friend of sending you and scroll through them.
But games are very different, right?
Yes.
Because with a game, you've gone Flappy Bird, what's the session time?
It's like eight minutes, you know?
You go Subway, something like this.
I mean, don't quote me on those stats.
I don't know exactly what Subway server session times in.
But it's not five seconds, right?
But, I mean, so this was our big question.
Will people basically do this hyper-casual doom scrolling?
But for gaming and it will be answers, yes.
Awesome.
Great idea. Can't wait to get working with you. And we will have you back on the program in six months and see what your progress has been. Really excited, Albert and Boris. Thanks for coming on the pod.
Thanks. I've been a pleasure. I look at 10,000 startups every year. What is the essential nature of Uber or Robin Hood, these incredible companies I was lucky enough to invest in? They focused on their customers. They focused on their product. And then they had support for chores. Let's call it.
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Welcome back to Twist.
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are going to make our lives easier in time. And even more importantly, there's one company called
OneX that's making a robot called Neo that's designed just for your home. It's my absolute dream.
So to tell us more about it, how it's going to come to market and win, please join me in welcoming to the show.
It's Burtt Burnick. How you doing? Welcome to the show.
Hey, great to be here. Looking forward to this one.
So I've known about 1X for a while, you know, keeping track of your progress and so forth.
But one thing I didn't know was that you guys actually got started building robots not for the home,
but for industrial settings. And you had a robot called the Eve Industrial on Wheels years back,
but made a pivot towards the home. But take us back in time to,
to the robot that you guys actually put into industrial applications years back.
When I started the company, it's been 11 years.
It's been a while.
The first things that I really wrote down, they still stand today.
It's like, we want to make robots that are safe so they can live and learn among people.
They need to be capable.
Like, they need to have the dexterity, the strength, the agility that we have.
Or they're just toys.
And then, of course, it needs to be scalable and affordable so that you can have an impact.
And when we designed Eve, it was very early, and we didn't have the power density and the technology yet to make this as general as we would wish.
But we can make it very general for its time.
And it was an amazing robot.
And what people might not know is that I actually had Eve at home for multiple years.
Oh, really?
So you had the robot that was designed for what appeared.
Well, it wasn't a sign for industrial use cases, but it was like designed for general labor.
That's the thing about humanoid.
So to me, humanoid is a play and like, you want to create general labor.
Because at scale, if you look at the system at the limit, what is going to be the most reliable, the most affordable, the most intelligent and the most helpful is going to be whatever has the largest scale.
And all technology goes through these cycles.
And maybe the simplest one to talk about is computers, right?
Started with mainframes.
And at some point, consumer PCs came around.
and it got scaled to this incredible number and the ecosystem and the reliability and the cost
and everything that comes with it.
So now it's just this one tool, it's like the hammer that solves everything.
And whether you're like typing something up or you're recording a podcast, we're all doing it
on the same computer, right?
There's no specialist.
In the end, it actually goes full circle.
And the market is so big that you get specialization again.
It's happening in computers now.
You have like specific computers for inference.
for training, for simulation workloads,
for all kinds of things, right?
Because each of these markets that are gigantic at this point.
This is happening with robotics or physical AI.
It started with industrial robots.
That's kind of like our mainframe.
Now we're going through the general labor phase,
where you just want to create the machine that is as general as possible,
that can really unlock humanity from kind of being bottled.
the bottlenecked by access to productivity.
In the end, it'll probably be all Star Wars and there will be different droids for all kinds.
Anyway, there's a long way in a way of saying, like,
Eva was our best shot of like making something that's as general as possible to get started
on this multi-decade journey of how do we create something that can
completely and fully kind of empower us as humans to
work on the things that matter. And I had it at home because it was very important for me to make sure that like, hey, this is going to be in people's homes at some point. Right. We need to start early. But it wasn't safe enough. That's actually the thing. Like, it's extremely safe robot from what it is. And I would argue it's safer than most of the older robots out there today. But it was a bit too heavy and not quite general enough. And that was really what led us to use this for industrial markets. Because I've been working all my life on robotics.
And we built a lot of beautiful robots up through the years, but like they didn't have any real world impact.
And it was so important to me when I started one X.
We want to do something that has real world impact.
So it can't be on YouTube.
It can't be in the lab.
It has to actually be out there doing things.
And those industrial use cases were great early applications.
But if you want to make something that is generally useful to humans, you're going to need a couple of things to make that happen going off of the original Eve idea into Neo, which is legs.
And I would presume modern AI techniques that allow the robot.
to become more generally useful
by learning new things on the go.
So it sounds like you had a good proof of concept
and then you refined it and then imbued it
with the latest in kind of modern AI.
And as a combination, you've come up with Neo,
which we're going to put on the screen right now
and to everyone can see it.
And the result is essentially a softer, lighter,
more intelligent and more, frankly, human robot
is my read of Neo?
Is that a fair encapsulation?
I've got many reasons for this.
Let me start with a couple of like,
very important ones that I think is quite unique to 1X.
We've been very all in on we have to create something
that moves and interacts with the world
exactly like a human does,
all the way down to like the smallest interaction of like
how, what's the stiffness of like the tissue and your skin
and how does that interact with the world, right?
If you get that right and the sensing and everything,
then you can take all of humanity's knowledge
mostly encoded in video and other things that exist out there.
And these priors hold and you can use them to get intelligence off the ground.
And this is so important because the alternative is go out and create an internet size data.
I'm not saying these things aren't useful.
We also use teleop.
It's not the solution to bootstrap your way to having billions of tokens that you can train your models on.
So you kind of have to find some way to bootstrap.
trap. And I think that's what makes me the most excited about Neo these days, is that we're
getting to where we're clearly seeing that that works. Like, the world model work that we've
been putting out, and there's some amazing stuff coming right around the corner, actually,
on this. That's the continuation of that. Really starts proving out that this bet is a bet that
holds. And we can get true general intelligence. Most of what you see robots do today on
YouTube are kind of like fine-tuned policies, as we call them, meaning like it's not necessarily
one task, but like you take a set of tasks and you gather a lot of data on specifically these
tasks. You can have the robot do these tasks, maybe in another environment, but the tasks are
the same tasks and they're very similar. What we're building here is actually true general intelligence
where you can ask the robot to essentially do anything and it will do a pretty good job at it.
Let's go back. We're going to get into world models in a second. But the point you made about
Neo, the robot for your home, designed for that, having similar physical attributes to humans.
You mentioned like finger, skin, tension, for example. That allows you to map how humans interact
to the world to the robot itself so that way it can learn more cleanly, accurately,
quickly from how the world operates. So essentially, as you make it more human, it learns faster.
It does, right? It's just like, if I pick up.
something up, I do that in a specific manner with my fingers. Like, I rotate, if like, if I rotate
that one, like you just rotated that in your hand, right? The way you use your fingers to do that,
it's very hard to transfer that to like a three finger gripper or a claw or whatever, right? It
doesn't transfer. So like, yeah, then you would need to go out and gather all that data.
So that's one part of it that's just so important. It learns faster.
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one, of course, is that the world is made for us.
Yeah.
So, like, if you want to get around the home and, like, do all these things that you don't
do yourself, you kind of have to be very close to a human.
And I also think there's something quite magical about creating something that the
embodiment kind of connects to us emotionally.
And the companion part of the product is also so big part of the product that doesn't
get talked enough about.
It's not just about doing the labor.
It's about doing the labor and being your companion throughout life and how this can kind
like help you interact better with technology.
And I think we're very quickly trending, at least for me now that's using this every day,
in the direction of like, I don't talk to my computer.
I talk to my robot.
Yeah.
It's you away from screens and gets you more present than like your everyday life.
And I think there's a beautiful story to be told there someday about how this can get us
away from screens.
Well, I think also there's an enormous elder care component to this.
I mean, we've all heard about.
how society is grain, how our elderly, you know, parents and friends are lonely.
And so to me, like, sure, we have pets.
That's what great.
But pets can't help you with dishes.
And you know what?
What if you're older, need help?
And you're a little bit lonely.
Well, we can kind of fulfill a lot of that with one device in the case of Neo.
And I don't view that as dystoping at all.
I view it as a way that humans are taking care of humans via technology.
And to me, that's a good future.
100% agree.
And this is actually one of the main things that gets me up in the morning.
I think we are at a point in here.
history where this is not optional.
Like we have to apply technology to solve this because we have to be able to give
her a one essentially like dignity in the way you get treated as you age.
And people sometimes mistake this for being like a replacement.
It is not.
And I like to say as someone who has one at home, like it doesn't replace my dog.
It doesn't replace my kids.
It doesn't replace my wife.
It is something new, right?
and just like a dog
is also something new
that you add to your family
yeah this beautiful companion
throughout life
that like it's always on your side
it's helping you with everything
it remembers what's going on
and I kind of almost see it more
for like my Hobbs
in Calvin and Hobbs
uh huh
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
well if you don't know that reference
Calvin and Hobbs is an American
child focused comic strip
and a young boy has a stuffed tiger
that he thinks is real
and they play games
and such. So that's the context. So essentially it becomes... If you don't get that context,
go read it. Yeah. Bill Watterson. It's amazing. It's a great... I grew up on it. So that's very
near and dear to my heart. So here's the thing, though. You're talking about, you know,
YouTube demos, and we're not going to name out any names. We're not going to say figure.
We're not going to name any of the companies out there who are famous for doing a lot of demos online,
versus the ability to make something that works, you know, in your home. So you have Neo at home right now.
And I know pre-orders are up. It's going to start shipping.
later this year, we'll get to that in a second, 20K or 500 bucks a month. So how good now is Neo
at general household tasks and how quickly is it improving against that problem set? And the
context here, Beren, is that I'm curious about the one X world model. And I'm also curious about how
teleop plays into this because I love the idea of being able to call an expert into my Neo to help
it learn a new task. But at the same time, to me, with my unlettered perspective here,
is that certainly after enough usage,
will have closed those gaps
because enough people will have needed that bit of help.
So I'm curious about compared to YouTube demos,
how we're doing today,
and how quickly we're improving Neo.
I want to back up once, then.
I'll answer that from like a bird's eye view.
So first of all, you asked a question earlier,
which I kind of covered by all of it,
which is why the home first, right?
Because this is about general labor,
so it's not just the home.
But it has to start in the home,
because we want our machines to live and learn among people.
and we wanted to like hold the door open for grandma
and we wanted to understand the social context of work
and this enormous diversity is actually what gives intelligence
so if you're in this narrow environment
where you're seeing the same thing every day
you don't actually learn
it's the same for people like we need to learn
so that's why kind of the home has to happen first
and that's also why I think like
this let's call it the early adopter program
like what we're shipping here the 20K robots
literally was called the early adopter program.
And it's going to be rough.
I'm just going to tell everyone what problem.
It's going to be rough because it's the first time in history
and one does this.
But it's going to be one heck of a journey.
And right now, I would say, in my home,
the robot is doing a reasonably good job.
It's not doing everything, but it's like,
it's doing my laundry.
It's doing a lot of the tidying and cleaning.
It's doing a lot of fun stuff just around like companionship
and just being around, like opening the door,
if like a guest's coming over or all these things.
That's a normal party trick.
Opening a door when the door dash guy comes over is actually a lot of fun.
Just see what you can package.
So now the way this works right now is there are two modes.
And we're going to listen to customer feedback here also.
So like knowledge is locked in stone.
But like the way it works right is there's two modes.
There's best effort autonomy mode where you're running the world model.
And it's doing like whatever I ask it to do.
And it'll do best effort.
And you can ask me to do things with just speech.
You can talk to it.
And it's extremely general, right?
The thing that blew my mind the most is,
the solid day was like,
I was just asked the robot,
like, hey, can you pick the post-it note on the board over there
and read it to me?
And the robot could do that.
That's not the training data.
Like, that's pretty magical to me, right?
That's actual true general intelligence.
Now, next time I ask it about the same thing
because it was so fun,
hey, look at this.
Like, Neo, go read the Post-it note.
it didn't get the post-it node.
So it doesn't always work.
That's my probabilistic AI.
Dang it.
And this is actually the magic of the world model.
Because what it gives you is it gives you this incredible general base layer of intelligence
where you can have the robots sensibly, just based on voice,
it will have a sensible approach to essentially any task.
Now all you need to do is to have a try better than it learns.
And that's a lot of fun.
There are tasks where this is extremely fun.
works. Like, it's very good of laundry, because if it screws up folding my shirt, I just ask
you to do it again. Right. Not a lot of risk. If it's taking grandma's like ancient vase
out of the cabinet to put it on the table, I would probably not do it that way. So, there are tasks
for easily repeatable and where like failure is not a problem. Then the robot is actually very good.
Opening a door is not a good example, because we make the robots just like us, right, to be
soft, compliant, low energy, lightweight. So, like, it won't hurt itself. It won't hurt the door.
You can just try it against it.
So for these tasks, it's starting to work extremely well.
For tasks where you don't want it to fail,
then we're still relying largely on scaling our fleet also internally
to work on these tasks to get them to where there's an extremely high probability of success
and also that you have a very good way of ensuring that if the task is going to fail,
you identify it early and you stop.
this is another thing that's incredibly cool about the world model
because it works very similar to how we do
when we're thinking, right?
So you said you have kids.
So if you're going to go around like pick up the coffee cup
with hot coffee,
then you will immediately kind of like simulate forward
what can go wrong.
Like through your mind immediately shows up
like you pouring coffee on the kid or like all these things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then you select the safest kind of like trajectory
to achieve your task.
based on all these constraints.
And this is literally what the world model is doing.
It is looking forward, simulating, like,
if I take these actions, what will happen?
And that's kind of like a search.
And then like, hey, here's the best way to do this.
Yeah.
And we're working very heavily on the safety side of that current.
And like, how do you ensure that the robot always takes
the safest possible paths to do things?
And how do you ensure that if there's unduly risk
that the robot does not do the task?
Now, this is still working in progress?
This is still working progress, but it's incredibly important progress, because safety has two aspects.
It's the aspect where, like, the robot just is physically not able to harm you because it's light enough and low energy and soft and all these things that we've been working on for a decade.
And that's kind of like, that's a separate thing because that's just you prove out that this is safe. Standard certifications.
And then you have the AI part of things where right now for customers, we limit to some extent what the robot is allowed to do.
It's not allowed to cook, for example.
It's not allowed to cook, et cetera, right?
No hot liquids, no, like, dangerous items, these kind of things.
But, of course, long term, we want to be able to do this with a very good safety profile.
And that's really, like, I think now the bleeding edge of, like, what's getting worked on on the AI side to ensure these things can be done safely.
So in my...
Oh, sorry, please.
I was using it.
So, in my house, that best effort AI mode is what I use when I'm home.
And it's a lot of fun.
When I leave for work, I just take up my knee.
app and I say that I'm leaving, do all the daily chores. When I come home, it's all done. And there is
sometimes tele-up involved in that to make sure that everything gets done super well. Yeah. And I don't
care. I'm not there. I don't care either. I just want the laundry to be done. I want there to be
clean socks for every child when they're needed. You know, like, I mean, that's, that's why people
are like, oh, 500 bucks a month. I'm like, yeah, but do you know how much this would save my life? Like,
it gets worth it pretty quickly.
Now, I want to talk about the world model for a second.
You guys have written a lot about how VLMs are not a sufficient answer to general intelligence for physical AI, aka Robibs.
For folks out there who are listening who are not as deep into AI as you are, can you explain what a world model is and what it took to build the one you guys have released and apparently are going to be updating very soon?
VLMs are essentially
take a language model
and then
bolt on some actions that a robot can do.
And how does this work
done in practice, right? So, okay,
you take a screenshot essentially
of the world.
So yeah, and you have some text of what you want to achieve,
and you have a picture of how the world works,
and then you make a plan.
And then you start executing this plan
and you take a new screenshot of the world
and do this. And it doesn't
really capture the non-resteakure
the dynamics of the world.
And the beautiful thing about human intelligence
is that we understand how the world works
down to like we can visualize what will happen
when we do things. And to do this you need to capture
like the spatial and temporal dynamics
essentially. That's a complicated word
but what it essentially just means is we live in 3D
and we care about time.
We see how the world evolves in 3D over time.
language models is like a 2D screenshot.
It doesn't have time.
It doesn't have 3D.
And it works incredibly well, by the way.
Like language models are incredible.
I fucking love them.
Yeah, yeah.
It's just it's not the full solution for general intelligence.
It's a very narrow type intelligence that works really well on a subset of problems.
And it's very exciting to see that when you actually train these world models,
which then essentially what we're training them on is, can you predict what's
will happen. So a very canonical example would be, if I take this and I drop it, what happens?
That doesn't sound too complicated. You can do that and that's like, it's not magical. Like,
it learns how physics works essentially. But when you start doing this at scale, there's a lot of
magical things that happen. So for example, back to why the home and why among people, to navigate
a social situation to get your coke in the fridge, the robot needs to understand how people will
behave.
And the world model includes humans.
We can see now in the world model that like people
appear in the world model, right?
Because the robot is thinking about what people, how they
will look, what they will do, etc.
People appear in the world model and behave like people.
This is kind of like
an inception type argument here,
but like it's kind of like an
AGI complete problem because to be able
to fully understand how to interact with the world,
you need to be able to fully simulate how people
work.
Yeah. And
it is just
in my opinion is the
natural next step in intelligence
right so it's not that we're not using language
clearly language is a part of our
intelligence but language is not
the base one of our
intelligence that is our
sensory visual
body and how we
interact with the world and you can see
this with the kids right they learn how the world
works and then they start to express this
through language
but slowly yeah
so
it's a it's a it's
really exciting and we are starting to see like I said like the first kind of breadcrumbs of like things
with robot data like this working better than the pure digital data getting us increasingly
confident that like the future of AI will be models that actually train on an embodiment not
just the web now we still train on the web it's not like instead of it's in addition to
yeah but it's currently a missing component that I'm very excited about so
when you get the early adopter neos out into the market this year,
and I do want to ask you about how many when and so forth in a second,
but putting that aside for now,
as you get more of them out there,
that increases essentially the Neo footprint in the real world
to test its vision model against reality,
and I presume greatly increase the flywheel of learning
that you guys can then bring to bear on future iterations to its intelligence, right?
100%.
Like, this is one of the most important things we do, right?
and why we need to get it out there as early as possible.
That's why I'm excited, actually, that you're saying it's going to be a little rough for the early adopter,
because that means you're getting that out probably as soon as you can to get the learning started to make it better.
So how many neos do you need in homes to have the right influx of data to learn and improve the world model and embodied intelligence as quickly as you like?
Is it 100 neos? Is it 10,000? I don't have a good sense of scale.
The honest answer here is that no one knows
because it's not been done before.
I can give you some first principal numbers.
Yeah.
We know that pre-training on a data set roughly the size of YouTube
gets you very far with respect to general intelligence.
Now, of course, that data doesn't actually have
what we call agentic behavior
and it doesn't have physical interactions with like forces.
The agentic behavior is actually extremely important.
we spent 30 seconds on it.
When we train on video, you only know what's going to happen next.
You don't know what was the action that the agent took.
So like, you know, if I'm going to pick up my phone over there, I think, first of all,
I have a goal I want to achieve.
I want to pick up my phone.
So I know the goal.
And then I decide to take an action to go do it.
And then you see the result.
So these are like the three different types of data.
Video only has the last one.
Robot data has all three.
It has the internal state of a robot.
What was it thinking?
What was trying to achieve?
What was the actions it decided to attempt?
Here you see the result.
So this data is way richer.
So we hope we can get away with way less data.
But if you look at YouTube as an example,
about 10,000 robots,
you will be having about the same influx of data as YouTube has.
So that's a good baseline.
That's not a small number,
but not an insurmountably large number,
because you could get half of YouTube with 5,000, I presume,
it kind of scales up and down.
And the YouTube corpus is so big.
Like, that's actually a pretty impressive amount of data inflow
from just 10,000 robots compared to all of YouTube.
And just to the correct story,
it's not all of existing YouTube,
but the upload rate to YouTube, which is growing,
is about the same as the influx from 10,000 robots.
Oh, okay, I see, I see, I see it.
Okay, well, that's still doable.
That's within...
It's very doable.
It's very doable.
But it doesn't stop there, of course.
The goal here is to create something that is so intelligent
that it can really accelerate the progress of humanity.
You will have robots helping us build out all our infrastructure,
make sure we have enough manufacturing, enough compute, data centers, power infrastructure.
Everything is done sustainably because if you don't have to cut corners on cost and labor,
why not do everything sustainably?
progress science.
These AI models
will not really help us
solve all about standing problems in science
or especially medicine
without doing lab work, right?
Your AI needs to design the experiment,
run the experiments, qualify and make sure
the data was done correctly.
iterate on this.
Like that's how you do research.
And today it's extremely ball and that models
are getting good at coming up with suggestions,
but they can't close the loop and check where it worked.
Well, we have to go into the real world for that.
And if we're going to do that, we're going to ape human institutions like laboratories and so forth.
So it makes sense to have a humanoid robot doing that.
It's just, it's funny because when we're talking about Neo today, I'm thinking about having a helper in the house because that's what I need.
And I'm fixated on that because it's what I want.
But in your example of improving the intelligence of these general purpose robots over time to do more and more things, to me, they're moving in some sense away from the home and into a dark factory or a,
a dark lab where there's not humans per se.
It's just robots doing what we need them to do.
So it's interesting that we end up training them at home to be more generally useful out on their own.
It's almost like we're raising children as a class of robots and then sending them out into the world.
What's the time gap between, you know, Neo getting good enough at the home stuff that you're like,
this is ready for everyone to buy one?
and when we can have humanoid robots
helping us automate laboratory work to accelerate science.
Is that a short time period or is that relatively long?
It's quite short.
The home is actually the most complex.
Really?
Why it's such a good place to start
because you have to solve.
Then you just like, you jump into the water
and now you need to learn to swim, right?
So like I do want to make sure that we
really strive to satisfy all of our customers
and the demand.
And that's kind of like what's constraining it now.
So exactly when we roll out in some of these other markets
really depends on how quickly we can scale manufacturing.
Okay, so let's talk about that.
Before we jumped on, you guys just opened up a new facility in San Carlos.
You're going to have, I think you said, design and even manufacturing under one roof.
Absolutely everything on a one roof here.
So research, development, AI, production, search.
And in production, we also mean manufacturing development and R&D.
We build the machines. We build the machine.
Everything on a one roof.
And this is, you know, actually, this is one of the things that I'm very proud of with OneX
and it's quite unique.
We literally go raw materials, even further than raw materials.
We develop new alloys and materials all the way up to the foundation walls on the
eye side on the one roof.
And for 0 to 1.1.
technology, this is incredibly important because the development speed is just going to be a function
of how quickly you can iterate across the entire stack. And if you're reliant on suppliers,
it's going to be extremely hard. But even more importantly, almost all of the great discoveries
that we have made on how to make robots safer, more affordable, and just in general, better,
they are between the lines of these disciplines of science, right? So it's when someone on the hardware
side says, like, hey, I see you're struggling with that. If I do this, I think a model would learn
better. Or like, oh, you need these tolerances in assembly. That's really hard. You don't actually
need that. I can just use a neural net and we can learn how to calibrate this and you can
loosen up your tolerances and we can produce cheaper. And it's like this incredible kind of
almost like Bell Labs types think of science. And I think it's the most exciting world to work,
actually. It's one of the few, I think, really good examples of when in-person work is not
just better, it's much better.
And I like that you're having
that effect. But at this new facility
in San Carlos, when you're at
early stages
of productivity, how many
neos can you make per quarter
per year? Is it $5.50,
500? The factory that we have in Hayward
that is now up and running
fully. And that will
be the factory that delivers home robots this
year. Okay. That can do
tens of thousand per year.
the one that we're building in Hayward now
can do hundreds of thousands per year.
Tens of thousands per year is a lot
given our earlier point about YouTube.
But I'm curious,
is there enough early commercial demand
from early adopters
to keep your factory running at that pace?
Or are you guys more looking to sell like a few thousand
to get them out there
to start the faster learning process?
There's demand.
But of course, the product quality needs to be there.
Yeah.
So right now we're being very cautious
and we're essentially doing very fast ramp of like a batch.
Then we evaluate in the market because we do deploy.
We're not at end customers yet or in homes, right?
And things are under NDA and stuff.
But like we, of course, we're testing this.
So it goes into homes and some older industrial applications.
And then we get data.
We figure out how well this works.
We figure out what's not optimal.
we rev the design
we do a quick batch again
so we're kind of like running our factor at like
full steam retool full steam retool
and we're doing this until the product is rock stable
you only get to do this once
like this is the first time in history that anyone does this
and ships robots like this
and we want to make it right
yeah that's also why we haven't really given
a specific date on shipment we've said
we're shipping 2026 and we will
we're good on track for that
but it is when it's ready
because you all do this once
No, no, I, that makes perfect sense to be.
I can wait six months.
It's fine.
I will not wait six years, but I will wait six months.
I'm a financial nerd, Bant.
So I'm really curious about the $20,000 price point.
And everyone knows economies of scale, bring down the price of things and so forth.
You're doing smaller batches.
But does $20,000 cover the bill of materials?
Does it cover bill materials plus labor?
Is it profitable?
Is it super unprofitable?
I just don't know where to peg that number in terms of,
economics for humanoid robots.
So I have to take you back all the way to the beginning then.
Because if you don't think about the scale and affordability from day one,
how are you going to manufacture this at scale,
then you're not going to get there.
Because you essentially get locked into a corner,
because you're making specific decisions about the design
and actually even the technical direction.
So if I're going to make a parallel, I'd say,
do you want to make an electric car or gasoline car?
you're not going to make a gasoline car in small volume
and then when you're like now we're going to ramp
let's make an electric car no
like you spent the last decade making the wrong technology
it doesn't work so
we really thought about this from day one
there's going to be billions of humanids on the planet
meaning you need to think about
is there any special raw materials in there that are rare
even further like how much raw material is in there
Neo just weighs 66 pounds
rather 30 kilos
almost a third of most of our competitors
well that's a third of the raw materials
that really matters when you're going to make a billion
yeah because it's dramatically reduces the number of ships
that have to bring gallium or whatever you know
and mining refinement like at a billion
you're starting to even think about like
oh that's a significant percentage of the world's aluminium and magnesium
like how are you going to refine that right so
my first thought was when you said billions was
do we have enough metal available to us
and then I think about how many cars we make per year
but it's not an insubstantial demand on, you know, raw materials, resources, and commodities.
Like, that's a lot of new product to bring to market.
Oh, clearly it is.
So, but you have to think about that.
And then you have to think about like tolerances, right?
How accurate does this need to be?
Because it sets your, the cost of like refining, essentially at these volumes, you take
raw material cost and you refine it into finished product.
And that's refinement step.
can actually be very cheap if you have the right output, right?
If what you need is something that doesn't need to be that accurate.
So that has to be core part of the design.
And what we're doing here with these unique motors that we have developed
that allows us to pull on these tendons instead of the classical gears.
One of the earliest discoveries of the company,
even before Eve went to the industrial applications, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So, like, Neo is just the endth generation of that technology, right?
that is extremely lenient with respect to manufacturing.
Like we can get away with very few parts, very loose tolerances, no special materials.
And if you then do all this and you start also working really early on how to automate assembly.
And of course, we are using robots in our factory, robots building robots.
Neos are building neos.
Text me a picture of that when we're done.
Then we can get very low on cost.
That thing said, it's an incredibly complex.
It's probably one of the most complex systems on the planet.
So it's going to take us some volume to get the cost down to where we would make money on that and have a margin.
But it is a sustainable business, which is the most important to me.
I'm just really glad to hear that because $20,000 is the point in which I can probably just buy one, you know, without having to like do math.
But if it was 50, then I'm going to say, I'd rather have, you know, a year of my.
It gets college paid or something.
So if it works at 20, hot damn.
I can see the real volume coming out and just being tremendous.
I'm really excited about this.
And I take it, given the work you've done on supply and components and stuff,
you're relatively de-risked from China in terms of supply chain issues.
There are certain key components that's very hard to get.
Magnets being the obvious one that everyone's powerful.
Yep, I'm funny.
Now we're deep into magnets, right?
because even the first year of 1X, what I was working on was like designing new processes for magnets
because the way we do our own motors. And we have some great companies there that we've been
working with in China on like co-developing these specific new ways of doing magnetics.
We're working towards also ensuring that this is something we can do in the US.
And there are amazing programs around this that are getting spun up.
So I'm very hopeful that this will be something that we can handle in the future.
But it's not there yet.
It's one of the many things that need to happen.
But I mean, outside of that, most of it is raw materials that is generally accessible in the open market, right?
So copper, aluminium, et cetera, Steve.
It's cheaper in some of the countries in Asia, but it's also available here.
And you don't have to worry about boats, shipping, times, tariffs and other things.
All right.
Last question before I let you go, Bering.
You guys initially raised from, as far as I can tell, like some Norwegian investors,
you went ahead and have expanded to a capital base with investors from around the world.
How much capital do you need to get Neo through its launch this year and then into its next generation?
Is that another couple hundred million?
Is that billions of dollars?
I'm curious.
The short answer is we have enough money to ship Neo.
Okay.
The longer answer is, I think the impact that this is going to have on human.
humanity is not yet fully understood. It's probably going to be one of the most impactful
technologies ever. Everything we consume is physical in the end. And intelligence becoming general
and physical is going to unblock essentially a new way of life, right? I am very excited to push
that to happen as fast as possible because I think it can build a very, very beautiful world,
where we all have what we need
and where we can all focus on what makes us human
instead of doing physical labor
so that we can get paid.
And that's a long way of saying
we will probably raise money
because we cannot accelerate the path.
Yeah.
But we don't need it to ship to consumers.
That's the...
I'm just trying to figure out how much you need.
because if you were a SaaS company
I could literally just sit down
think about your number of employees
and your current KAC
and I can do the math.
Robots are so different.
Well, let me say it like this.
If you want to go max max here,
it's we need
as much compute as everyone else,
right? We're going to train the best models.
Now we're going to train way better models
than everyone else because we're going to have
better data.
I'm also going to be smarter than them.
There's a lot of smart people there
but we're just going to have better data.
And then we need to also build out all the manufacturing.
So it's going to be a very capital intensive race.
That's a short way of doing saying that.
We do have a very potentially unfair advantage here, though,
which is that we can labor arbitrage our own scale.
Because you're making your own general purpose robots.
No, I mean, have you thought about just calling up Jensen and saying,
look, I'm in a hurry, I'm going to buy so much compute,
you should definitely give me another pile of money
so I can just go faster now.
Like I guess
I'm happily impatient
if that makes sense.
I would like this future to become even faster.
So I just hope that the investors out there get it
and are like knocking on your door constantly
trying to give you more money
because I don't think we can get to this future fast enough.
I'm just excited.
I love the positivity.
It's going to pick up a future.
So come back on the show
when Neo starts to go out to non-NDA
people, because I'm really curious to see how the reviews come. And I'm going to start asking my
spouse if I can, if I can throw my name down. But I think she's going to have something more
practical in mind. But, Beron, thank you so much for coming on and explaining this to me and
walking me through it. If people want to learn more, what's the website? Where should they go?
Well, next up tech. Clean and simple. Clean and simple. This is a lot of fun. Thank you for
a show. I appreciate you.
