The NEO Beta robot competed with a celebrity chef and cooked a steak

Chef and blogger Nick DiGiovanni engaged in a culinary "duel" with 1X's humanoid robot, NEO Beta, which managed to cook a medium-rare steak.

The competition was filmed in Sunnyvale, California, and the kitchen was specially equipped to give the robot flexibility and precision.

NEO Beta was tasked with doing every step of cooking the steak himself, from seasoning it to carefully turning it in the pan, so he had to control the temperature and time intervals to make this dish a success.

1X used the Meta Quest app to control the robot. It is said that the only limitation of NEO Beta so far in terms of full autonomy is the need to process and synthesize a significant amount of data at each stage.

The robot was dressed in a chef's robe and he perfectly coped with the preparation of the dish from the first attempt. Nevertheless, the filming was not without incidents. In one episode, NEO Beta accidentally dropped a bottle of olive oil.DiGiovanni later noted that NEO Beta had surpassed even masters like Gordon Ramsay.

The only operation that required direct human intervention was turning on the electric stove. The robot was equipped with real-time voice communication functionality through GPT-4o integration, but the team opted for controlled dialogue to create the atmosphere that DiGiovanni intended.

Interestingly, the cooking function is not yet included in the functionality of the first NEO Beta models.The first robots will focus on tasks that do not require contact with hot or sharp objects.

In September, 1X presented a realistic robot project called NEO, which according to the manufacturer can work independently for two to four hours. It can open doors, move various objects, wash dishes, and even play board games. In case of emergency, the robot can be remotely shut down in online mode.