1X Technologies reveals NEO Gamma in push for consumer-grade humanoid robots; the teaser is filmed inside a plush villa
by Dr. Piyush Mathur
On 21 February 2025, 1X Technologies—an AI robotics company co-headquartered in Moss, Norway, and Sunnyvale—California, introduced its latest experimental humanoid robot, NEO Gamma, to Netizens via social media outlets and a company blog post titled ‘Introducing NEO Gamma’. Authored by Dar Sleeper, the blog post describes the robot’s enhanced capabilities in comparison with the previous, NEO Beta, model. These capabilities, for the most part, could be witnessed, in a teaser video that the company posted on YouTube.
The 37-second long video shows NEO Gamma performing everyday tasks. After smoothly straightening up its neck, the robot walks, moves its limbs, grabs and hand carries items, cleans the floor, takes verbal and gestural instructions from a human, and sits gently and confidently in a sofa after an apparent whole day’s worth of work!
A still from 1X Technologies’ video teaser on YouTube on NEO Gamma, its new experimental model (prototype) of home robot
Specifically, the footage shows the robot—draped in a space-age style, smooth exosuit—unplugging a hot kettle, carrying it (along with a ceramic cup in the other hand), and putting it on a breakfast table (as shown in the video still above); serving beverages (one time a bottle of wine); talking, and implementing verbal and gestural instructions from a woman (the presumed lady of the villa) to straighten out a painting hanging on a wall; carrying a large (laundry?) basket; vacuuming a floor; scrubbing a glass window; accepting a delivery through an already open door; cleaning a platform and picking up a bunch of keys and putting it onto an appropriate flat container; smoothly negotiating spaces around the villa’s human inhabitants (presumably a married couple); and ultimately occupying a dignified seat in a sofa centrally placed in the living room.
The unveiling of NEO Gamma suggests that 1X is positioning itself at the forefront of the rapidly evolving home robotics market, with the goal of making humanoid robots integral to everyday life.
Technological breakthroughs in human-robot interaction
At the core of NEO Gamma’s advancements is its ability to interact with humans in a way that feels both intuitive and natural. This is made possible through a combination of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and sophisticated physical design.
Sleeper’s post tells us that the robot’s conversational capabilities are powered by a custom, in-house large language model (LLM), developed by 1X Technologies specifically for the NEO series. What that implies is that NEO Gamma can understand and respond to complex verbal instructions, enabling seamless communication with its human users.
Another feature of NEO Gamma is the ‘Emotive Ear Rings’—a system designed to provide real-time visual feedback. These rings allow NEO Gamma to convey its status or responses through subtle visual cues and without the use of any protruding antennae or reflectors, thus showing a way forward in harmonizing robots with humans.
NEO Gamma also exhibits ‘whole-body control’ using ‘reinforcement learning’ from ‘human motion capture data’, allowing it to move like a human—‘with a natural human gait and arm swings’, and with an ability to ‘squat down to pick things up from the ground and sit in chairs, all while maintaining balance.’ This claimed improvement, many of whose facets can be seen in the video, makes NEO Gamma more versatile than previous humanoid models, which have tended to lack flowing movements through dynamic tasks in unstructured environments.
Another key breakthrough lies in NEO Gamma’s ability to handle ‘general-purpose manipulation’. While retaining as ‘a visual manipulation model capable of picking up a large variety of objects in different scenarios’ (trained by 1X) as the base, this robot partly utilizes ‘neural networks trained to predict tele-operated actions directly from raw sensor data.’ In other words, NEO Gamma is not fully autonomous: It observes and replicates human-guided actions via teleoperation-informed learning.
Blending autonomy with human oversight, aspiring for durability and user comfort
This hybrid approach, as cryptically outlined in Sleeper’s post, can be expected to balance independent function with human oversight, allowing the robot to tackle a broader range of unpredictable household tasks. This model reflects a growing trend in robotics, where companies—Teleo, DriveAI, for example—blend AI-driven autonomy with remote human guidance to ensure safety and reliability in complex environments.
NEO Gamma’s design includes soft covers around its tendon-driven joints, intended to reduce injury risks and minimise impact on its surroundings; it also features a Shimaseki-knitted suit—3D-printed from soft, durable nylon—which gently sticks to the robot while allowing for flexible movement.
The robot’s hardware is reportedly 10 times more reliable than the NEO Beta model, suggesting that 1X has made considerable improvements to mechanical resilience and component lifespan. Additionally, the robot’s operating noise is claimed to have been brought down to the level of a typical household refrigerator—which might still be noisy enough (though one doesn’t notice it in the video, except that it also has background music reducing the viewer’s ability to decipher diegetic and ambient sounds). At any rate, the company’s claim is that NEO Gamma noise level shows a10 decibel decrease from the NEO Beta model.
Being equipped with four microphones (positioned at the front, back, left, and right) with ‘beamforming and echo cancellation’ capabilities, NEO Gamma can prioritise the speaker closest to it and (relatively) clearly capture audio commands made to it. This robot can also play music like an advanced stereo (with bass and 360 degree sound effect), Sleeper’s post notes.
Environmental impact and sustainability considerations
While NEO Gamma’s technological achievements are impressive, Sleeper’s post and 1X Technologies’ YouTube teaser ignore its environmental dimension. The robot’s advanced AI capabilities must rely on energy-intensive processors, which can be expected to increase overall power consumption. Although on-device processing reduces the need for constant cloud computing, the energy required to operate a humanoid robot of this complexity should be substantial.
Moreover, the materials typically used in advanced robotics—such as synthetic polymers and rare earth metals—pose challenges for ecologically sustainable production. While the 3D-knitted nylon suit demonstrates a move toward additive manufacturing, which generally produces less waste, the long-term recyclability of these materials remains uncertain—even though yarn reuse itself is a prospect touted by Shima Seiki.
That having been said, widespread adoption of home robots (which is the scenario that 1X and other home robot manufacturing companies are aspiring for) could lead to resource efficiency in other areas. But against that backdrop, it is useful to note that in the teaser video, the NEO Gamma is shown to operate inside a home that is unmistakably a very high-income accommodation and household, which also happens to lack a toddler. While that scenario can be cosy, seductive, and exciting (and that video itself is likely to have a powerful demonstration effect on its average viewer), it also betrays the sense that home robots manufacturing companies have so far been refusing to imagine the mass market space, for real, that they otherwise claim to want to serve in the near future.
To access Dan Sleeper’s company blog post, click here (or copy and paste the following URL on your browser bar: https://www.1x.tech/discover/introducing-neo-gamma).
To access 1X Technologies’ teaser (‘Introducing NEO Gamma | Another Step Closer to Home’) on YouTube, click here—or copy and paste the following URL on your browser bar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVcBa6NXAbk
Dr. Piyush Mathur is the author of the book Technological forms and ecological communication: a theoretical heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017), which introduced concepts such as ‘proximation’, ‘biospheric objectivity’, ‘ecological reference’—and articulated an ‘eco-communicative theory of technology’.
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