00:00:00 · Ty Morse
[00:00:00] S0: Today, I am sitting down with Bernt Børnich, the founder and CEO of 1X. You want to ship 50,000 humanoid robots next year. So can we start off with you just walking me through how do you actually go from just r and d to actually shipping that number of robots in twelve months?
00:00:13 · Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:00:13] S1: Yeah. So, I mean, the factory we're in now in in Hayward is built out to a capacity fully ramped about 10,000 units. So that's really been, like, the goal this year. We're not gonna do 10,000 because we're gonna be pretty much towards the end of the year when the line is fully ramped. But in parallel, we're building out San Carlos. So to make this happen, we have to do some parallel building, and that's gonna be a 100,000 units at full capacity per year. So a 110 k per year, but, of course, most of that volume is gonna come online pretty late next year. The real gating item here is really kinda like not just shipping 50,000 units, but ensuring that you don't get them back. Right? So we we have to kinda scale our volume at a rational rate. Prototypes are easy. Like, it's a cliche, but it's true. Prototypes are easy. Production is really hard. We've churned through a lot of issues here to kinda get to where we're confident in ramping volume. But whenever you take, like, the next big step on the volume, you always find things that you don't find in the previous one. So, like, it's it's just statistics. Right? When you do a 100 units, you don't find the same things that you find when you do a thousand or 10,000 because things that are rare just gets statistically significant and, like, your your yield really needs to come up. So we hope to find a good balance where we take the time to really iterate on the product and, like, get the lessons learned and get that back into the fleet and then go into larger and larger volumes as we kinda cross these gates, quality gates. But the goal is 50,000, so it's gonna be a lot of work.
00:01:45 · Ty Morse
[00:01:45] S0: I I was thinking about, like, cars when you were talking. And with a car, if you're testing some car just yourself, you're gonna experience most of what it is to own a car just driving around. Whereas with, a humanoid robot, the number of, you know, random, super unusual behaviors that someone might have this robot in is, like, multiple orders of magnitude, more than a car. And so going from, like, zero to 50,000 cars is incredibly difficult. Going to 50,000 robots is, like, I think probably, like, one or two orders of magnitude more difficult. How do you kind of plan for that?
00:02:19 · Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:02:19] S1: As I think there... There's pros and cons. Right? So a humanoid robot is a lot of parts. It's quite complicated, but it is not the same number of parts as a car. And I see a lot of companies kinda compare humanoid robots to cars. And I think if you do that, you should kinda, like, take a step back and think about what you've made because a car is, like, 50,000 parts. A well designed humanoid robot is probably about 1,000 parts, and a car is, like, 4,000 pounds. A well designed human robot is hopefully less than 70 if it's gonna be safe. So it is actually a simpler system in that sense. Although, like, the individual complexity and number of moving parts is larger. So you you get some on that side, but you're, of course, entirely correct also that, like, it's a way less constrained environment that you're deploying into. So you're gonna see a lot of... Lot more weird shit. That's just the way it's gonna be. I think a lot of it comes down to expectation management. Like, it's gonna be bumpy. It's it's not gonna be perfect. I really hope we can provide a very good customer service and ensure that whatever happens, we're treating you well, and we really figure this out, iterate on this, and make sure that you don't have to face the same problem repeatedly. But, of course, we also need to deploy into some quite structured, more, like, less variance type environments for parts of the volume and not have 50,000 robots into 50,000 different tasks. That that would not
00:03:51 · Ty Morse
[00:03:51] S0: be manageable. Some employees have the robots in their own home, and I think you're one of them that's just got this robot walking around this environment and, like, experiencing it. And you're kinda, like, a few years ahead of everyone else. The other thing too is you probably had multiple versions of your robot in your home, and so I'd like to know what it feels like on just some personal experience level to have the first evolution of that bot in your home environment and also how that's progressed and, like, how the trust has, you know, been built over time.
00:04:19 · Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:04:19] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually kinda interesting because it's about three years now since I kinda had the first, like, let's call it pilot at home, where I actually had our previous robot, Eve, the wheeled humanoid, which is a bit, like, bigger and more heavy, but very capable at home. And it was a lot of fun, and we learned a lot. And it was also one of the main inspirations for why, like, we had to kinda speedrun getting to, like, the full biped to be able to do all these tasks around the home and and also in, like, other diverse environments. Legs are actually very useful also for manipulation. It was a hard lesson learned. But I think the evolution over time is surprisingly slow. Like, it takes a long time. Right? So... And and this is often because you find something that doesn't really work and you need some significant data on this, then you need to iterate on your hardware, and you need your hardware to kinda redeploy, and now you get new data. And we're not in that many homes, so, like, it takes time to kinda run that loop. But luckily, we started very early, so we... We've had a lot of time to to think about these things. But I think mainly to me, the kinda, like, important barrier that has to be crossed on the trust side is is safety. And that's something that we're still working really hard on, and we really have a big goal to kinda, like, prove out safety this year in a more formal manner. So I'm very excited about that, and hopefully, we can share some more about that towards the end of the year.