November 11, 2024 – On the 9th of this month, 1X, a company backed by OpenAI, unveiled a new skill of its humanoid robot Neo Beta – cooking. Neo went head-to-head with celebrity chef Nick DiGiovanni in a home cooking challenge, competing to create the perfect medium-rare steak.
Nick, notably, is the youngest finalist in MasterChef history, a culinary reality show known for its large scale and diverse range of participants in the US. His YouTube channel currently boasts 21.2 million followers.
Initially, the team anticipated that Neo Beta might struggle with the cooking task, considering it was a newly acquired skill. As a precautionary measure, extra steaks were prepared. However, Neo Beta surprised everyone by successfully cooking the steak on its first attempt, leaving the 1X team and Nick to enjoy the additional steaks.
Neo Beta’s movements were controlled through 1X’s VR Teleoperation App on Meta Quest, while its dialogue was manually triggered. Although the robot has the capability to engage in real-time conversations via GPT-4, a more “controlled” communication style was chosen for the event.
Neo Beta independently handled tasks such as seasoning and flipping the steak, but required assistance to turn on the stove. Despite Neo Beta’s collaboration with Nick to complete the dish, the cooking feature will not be immediately available to early users. 1X explained that they want Neo to gain experience with safer tasks before handling operations involving sharp objects or high temperatures.
According to reports, Neo stands approximately 1.65m tall, weighs about 30kg, and can walk at a speed of approximately 1.12m/s. Its hands have 20 degrees of freedom, allowing it to lift weights up to 70kg, which is more than twice its own weight, and carry objects up to 20kg. However, its operational time is relatively short, ranging from 2 to 4 hours.
