The robotics industry just hit its iPhone moment.
1X Technologies has launched NEO – a $20K humanoid robot that’s still tele-operated today but built to train tomorrow’s autonomous workforce.
What powers this shift isn’t hardware – it’s the new generation of models: NVIDIA’s GR00T N1, Tesla’s vision-first Optimus, and Figure AI’s Helix system.
Together they’re teaching machines to understand the physical world predicting torque, grip, and motion at 100 Hz instead of predicting words.
With costs falling below $15K and latency under 100 ms, humanoids are finally approaching commercial viability.
It’s the quiet start of a trillion-dollar platform shift.
Physical AI will scale labor the way GPT scaled knowledge.