1X Launches World Model Lab: Scaling Humanoid AI

1X has launched its new World Model Lab, a research organization dedicated to accelerating fully autonomous humanoids. This initiative follows major breakthroughs with their World Model, which enabled their NEO robots to perform unseen tasks without prior programming. The company is also welcoming Sam Sinha, formerly of Luma AI, as its Founding AI Researcher and Head of World Models. The NEO Factory in Hayward, California, is now operational, creating America's first high-volume humanoid robot factory. This factory removes the bottleneck for scaling their robot fleet, allowing 1X to focus on innovating their world model. CEO Bernt Børnich states that world models are crucial for freeing humanoid robots from narrow tasks. He emphasizes the need to own the entire technology stack, including pre-training video foundation models. The lab's goal is to pretrain foundation models using diverse data, such as video, human experience, and robot interactions, to build truly general humanoids. This development could significantly advance the capabilities of humanoid robots in the real world.