San Francisco, CA, and Moss, Norway — July 22, 2024 — 1X, an AI robotics company, is pleased to announce the appointments of three strategic hires. Jorge Milburn joins 1X as VP of Sales, Dar Sleeper as VP of Growth and Per Selvaag as VP of Design. These hires come as 1X prepares to bring its bipedal humanoid robot, NEO, to market, delivering on its mission to create an abundance of labor through safe, intelligent humanoids.

Backed by OpenAI, 1X has revolutionized humanoid robotics with NEO, a lightweight and soft bipedal robot capable of performing tasks through voice commands and natural language. To further progress on our mission, we are appointing 3 new hires. 

• Jorge Milburn joins 1X as VP of Sales, bringing nearly 10 years of go-to-market experience at Tesla. He recently served as Global Head of Growth. He played a pivotal role in building the Supercharger network and led Tesla’s car business in EMEA, successfully introducing the Model 3 to Europe and establishing a Global Growth team. Originally from Uruguay, Jorge holds an MA in Economics. His responsibilities at Tesla included sales leadership, business planning, demand and supply optimization, delivery operations, and business analytics.
  
  
• Per Selvaag joins 1X as VP of Design, bringing over 20 years of experience in design, user research, data analytics, and robotics. His career includes roles as Chief Designer at Automobiles Peugeot, lead designer at BMW, and establishing the Human-Centered Design discipline at Equinor Data Science. He also founded and led a successful consultancy in the Bay Area.
  
  
• Dar Sleeper joins as VP of Growth to build lead demand and brand in the Bay Area. Most recently, a product manager at Tesla, Dar, played a key role in launching the campaign for Cybertruck and created lead demand for electric vehicles. 

"I am thrilled to welcome Jorge, Per and Dar," said Bernt Øivind Børnich, CEO of 1X. "Their expertise will be crucial as we prepare to bring NEO to market and enhance our products' design and user experience."

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About 1X
1X is a US-Norwegian AI robotics company specializing in developing robots with humanlike capabilities. With commercial deployments of the wheeled humanoid EVE and the ongoing production of their next product, a bipedal humanoid robot NEO, 1X builds their own models for embodied AI making robots capable of task manipulation and generalization. Our mission is to push the boundaries of AI and robotics to create a global abundance of labor through safe, intelligent humanoids.

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We have previously developed an autonomous model that can merge many tasks into a single goal-conditioned neural network. However, when multi-task models are small (<100M parameters), adding data to fix one task’s behavior often adversely affects behaviors on other tasks. Increasing the model parameter count can mitigate this forgetting problem, but also take longer to train, which slows down our ability to find out what demonstrations we should gather to improve robot behavior. 

How do we iterate quickly on the data while building a generalist robot that can do many tasks with a single neural network? We want to decouple our ability to quickly improve task performance from our ability to merge multiple capabilities into a single neural network. To accomplish this, we’ve built a voice-controlled natural language interface to chain short-horizon capabilities across multiple small models into longer ones. With humans directing the skill chaining, this allows us to accomplish the long-horizon behaviors shown in this video:

Although humans can do long horizon chores trivially, chaining multiple autonomous robot skills in a sequence is hard because the second skill has to generalize to all the slightly random starting positions that the robot finds itself in when the first skill finishes. This compounds with every successive skill - the third skill has to handle the variation in outcomes of the second skill, and so forth.

From the user perspective, the robot is capable of doing many natural language tasks and the actual number of models controlling the robot is abstracted away. This allows us to merge the single-task models into goal-conditioned models over time. Single-task models also provide a good baseline to do shadow mode evaluations: comparing how a new model’s predictions differ from an existing baseline at test-time. Once the goal-conditioned model matches single-task model predictions well, we can switch over to a more powerful, unified model with no change to the user workflow.

Directing robots with this high-level language interface offers a new user experience for data collection. Instead of using VR to control a single robot, an operator can direct multiple robots with high level language and let the low-level policies execute low-level actions to realize those high-level goals. Because high-level actions are sent infrequently, operators can even control robots remotely, as shown below:

Note that the above video is not completely autonomous; humans are dictating when robots should switch tasks. Naturally, the next step after building a dataset of vision-to-natural language command pairs is to automate the prediction of high level actions using vision-language models like GPT-4o, VILA, and Gemini Vision.

Stay tuned! 
Eric Jang

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In the latest episode of the Venture Europe Podcast, Bernt Børnich, CEO of 1X, sits down with host Calin Fabri to explore the evolving world of humanoid robotics.

Bernt shares his journey from a curious child dismantling kitchen gadgets to founding and leading 1X. He gives insight into the development of NEO, 1X’s next-generation android designed to assist with everyday tasks at home. He discusses the importance of designing safe, compliant humanoids capable of working alongside people in their daily environments. 

Bernt also discusses 1X's strategic expansion, with AI development centered in San Francisco Bay and a new manufacturing facility built in Norway. 

Throughout the episode, he explores the technical and ethical challenges of integrating androids into society, aiming to create an abundant supply of labor.

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Listen on Apple Podcast

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MOSS; NORWAY: 1X is currently developing its own production facility, actuator manufacturing, and robot assembly facility in Moss, Norway, right next to our campus and engineering team. This decision is more than just a matter of convenience—it's a commitment to keep building a vertically integrated company where every component of EVE and NEO is designed and produced in-house.

“The close proximity of both the actuator manufacturing, robot assembly, and testing site offers great advantages, especially for our team of creative engineers, brimming with fresh, yet untested ideas. Being adjacent to the manufacturing and assembly process allows them to quickly understand the practical aspects of transforming their creative concepts into feasible, efficient-to-manufacture products, says VP of Manufacturing Operations & Engineering, Csaba Hartmann. 

The manufacturing team consists of diverse professionals, including specialized manufacturing engineers and mechanical designers, process engineers, automation experts, quality engineers, supply chain experts, safety officers, and others. Each member plays a role in designing, trialing, and rolling out our large-scale manufacturing initiatives, contributing to enhancing scalability, rapid iterations, and safety at every stage of the manufacturing and assembly process. 

“Enabling teams that work side by side with each other and thus can easily get and act on feedback, is crucial for us to evolve and improve our products rapidly”, says Hartmann.

All 1X androids are designed with a safety-first mindset, featuring gearless motors and a soft exterior. Our commitment to safety extends beyond design, incorporating measures throughout the assembly process to ensure products are built to specs: thorough testing, quality control, and precise assembly processes.

We’re adopting quality control measures inspired by the automotive industry. We conduct thorough Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) on each assembly component to proactively identify and mitigate potential safety risks. 

“Our quality team interprets the results of the DFMEA and PFMEA and then defines the rigorous checks for the assembly process to ensure no safety aspect is overlooked,” says Hartmann. 

The assembly process includes rigorous checks of critical quality parameters to ensure no safety aspect is overlooked. Precision in the use of testing and assembly tools is emphasized to maintain high standards of accuracy. All components, especially motors, undergo extensive testing at multiple stages of assembly to validate their performance and reliability.

"At 1X, we prioritize scalable, cost-efficient manufacturing by integrating engineering expertise and rigorous quality control. Our approach leverages advanced technologies and carefully selected materials to enhance production efficiency. Committed to scalability, we ensure every process is optimized for cost-effectiveness and growth", says 1X CEO Bernt Børnich.

Join us

If you find this work interesting, we’d like to call attention to a few roles that we are hiring for to accelerate our mission toward creating an abundant supply of labor via safe intelligent androids:

• CNC Programmer and Operation Specialist
• Quality Engineer
• Senior Full-Stack Engineer
• Senior Mechanical Engineer
• Senior Electric Motor Design Engineer

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We also have other open roles across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines. Follow 1x_tech on X for more updates, and join us in living in the future.

‍March 18th, NVIDIA GTC, San Jose, California.‍

1X, a leading innovator in the humanoid robotics space, had its next-generation android, NEO, included in a demonstration of robots completing a variety of tasks during the keynote address by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at GTC, a global AI conference running through March 21 in San Jose, CA. 

Robots using the new NVIDIA foundation models will make major advances in being able to understand natural language and emulate movements by observing human actions — quickly learning coordination, dexterity, and other skills to navigate and interact with the real world.

Follow 1X on X and LinkedIn to stay updated on news and events.

1X will be attending the NVIDIA GTC Conference on March 18th. Our involvement signifies 1X's dedication to advancing in the field of Embodied AI, showcasing our latest developments, and engaging with the global AI community.

The NVIDIA GTC Conference is renowned for being a pivotal event that gathers innovators, researchers, and industry leaders worldwide to explore the latest advancements in AI, machine learning, and related technologies. Attendees can look forward to a program full of insightful talks, dynamic workshops, and demonstrations.

For more information about the conference or to register:
NVIDIA GTC Conference Official Page
Conference Program

We look forward to connecting with professionals to share our passion for AI and robotics at the event. See you at NVIDIA GTC.

As of March 1st, 1X  has expanded our operations with the establishment of dual headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and Moss, Norway. 

The Sunnyvale office will include a new branch of our studio for AI data collection and support the expansion of our AI team. The new HQ will be staffed by the AI team, the customer success team, service technicians, and a significant fleet of NEO and EVE androids.

Follow 1X on X and LinkedIn to stay updated on news and events.