The 1X World Model Lab | Est. 2026

Today, we're excited to announce that 1X has officially established the 1X World Model Lab, our new frontier research organization dedicated to accelerating the path to fully autonomous humanoids through large-scale embodied world model pretraining. Also, we’re proud to welcome Sam Sinha– previously a founding research scientist at Luma AI and a leader in scaling multimodal generative video models– as our Founding AI Researcher and Head of World Models.

We put this team together on the heels of major breakthroughs with our World Model. These advances enabled NEO to generalize to completely unseen tasks with zero-shot execution. For us, this was when the recipe for fully autonomous humanoids clicked:

The next frontier in AI requires scaling: web-scale media + egocentric human videos + sim + dexterous remote operated robot data + on-policy NEO data → real-world deployment for robot data collection and RL → abundance of data → physical AI

And with the NEO factory live, scaling the fleet to support real world data collection is no longer the bottleneck, so we’re doubling down on increasing the pace of innovation of our world model to unlock fully autonomous humanoids as fast as humanly possible.

“World models will free humanoid robots from the trap of narrow tasks in static environments by unlocking generalization, adaptability, and self-learning. But to reach full autonomy fastest you must own the entire stack — down to pre-training your own video foundation models. That’s why we built the 1X World Model Lab.”

— Bernt Børnich, CEO & Founder

More About The 1X World Model Lab

The 1X World Model Lab is a new embodied AI research organization focused on pretraining the foundation models to accelerate the emergence of embodied intelligence.

The lab is founded on a simple thesis: robotics is not a fine-tuning problem. To build truly general humanoids, we need to pretrain on the most important data from the very beginning.

Embodied intelligence requires models that see the physical world early, not just in post-training. This includes video, ego-centric human experience, interaction data, simulation, robot data collected with remote operation, and on-policy NEO data. Each provides a different signal about how the physical world works and how intelligent agents operate within.

The 1X World Model Lab will focus on large-scale AI pretraining, building frontier world models and reasoning models to enable spatial intelligence. These capabilities form the foundation for increasingly general and autonomous humanoid systems.

We believe the only durable moat in embodied AI will be data: the ability to collect, annotate, scale, and train on the right mixture of web-scale, human, simulated, remote operator-generated robot data, and robot-generated data.

1X is uniquely positioned to connect the entire learning loop—from pretraining and robot learning to evaluation, deployment, and the collection of on-policy data from real robots. By closing this loop, the 1X World Model Lab will accelerate the development of increasingly capable foundation models for humanoid robotics.

Welcoming Sam Sinha as Founding Researcher and Head of World Models

Sam brings world-class expertise in scaling large multimodal generative foundation models. At Luma AI, he played a key role in pushing the boundaries of image and video generation, including work on Uni-1. His deep experience in generative AI translates directly into building next-generation world models purpose-built for physical intelligence and humanoid robotics.

“We believe the only durable moat in AI is data — specifically, the ability to collect and learn from the optimal mixture at large scales. Embodied data has been treated as a second-class citizen for too long. Embodied AI is too important to be a fine-tuning problem. Scaling along every imaginable axis in robotics is the only way forward. 1X is uniquely positioned to close the full learning loop from data curation and pretraining, through real-world deployment.”

— Sam Sinha, Founding AI Researcher and Head of World Models

Join Us

The 1X World Model Lab is building the team that will define the future of embodied AI. We are actively hiring exceptional talent across the three pillars of AI: data, infrastructure and learning.

If you’re interested, email wmlab@1x.tech your background + proof of excellence and apply for roles on the 1X careers page.