Tesla Optimus Vs Figure AI Vs 1X Neo - Who Wins？

The prototype era is dying and the age of humanoid mass production is pretty much there or at least just starting. If you've been watching the news lately you would have seen humanoid companies popping up everywhere but there are three big players outside of China that really matter. Those big three Tesla, Figure and One X have just started moving to the next gear. Elon is liquidating billions to buy more Nvidia chips. Figure is showing off their humanoid factory that's pumping out robots every single hour and One X just launched their US dedicated humanoid factory and sold out straight away. If you think your job, your home or your daily routine is safe from the robot revolution then I think you're in for a bit of a wake-up call soon. Oh yeah and Boston Dynamics just showed off Atlas doing a whole new trick. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the humanoid report where we keep you updated with the incredible humanoid robot industry and its journey to us all having our own personal humanoid. Let's start with a quick look at Boston Dynamics's latest clip. It shows Atlas doing some pretty hardcore calisthenics. It reminds me of Junior from the breakdancing world who is still around two decades on as it goes but Atlas has it a bit easier with his 360 degree articulating joints. Anyway not much to add to on this. We're already used to seeing Boston Dynamics show cool gimmicky demos and to be honest I'm ready to start seeing some real world use cases. I think they're still at risk of being just an R&D company still with a cool prototype so we'll wait and see whether we ever get a gymnastic Atlas in our living room within the next five years. Personally I think we'll be able to buy an elusive Optimus first. I don't see them actually coming out with Atlas at least ready for home for a good few years if ever. And speaking of Optimus, during Tesla's most recent earning call the atmosphere shifted. This wasn't just a car company reporting on its quarterly deliveries anymore. This was an AI and robotics company that happened to sell cars on the side. Tesla has announced a staggering increase in capex moving towards a 25 billion dollar annual spend. As a reminder capex means capital expenditure on long-term assets whether buying new assets or spending on maintaining long-term assets they already own etc. And why? Because Elon has realized that while the white hat is the best-selling car in the world, the Optimus robot is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity that makes the automotive business look like a lemonade stand. And he's not the only one. Brad Kott of Figart has also said similar things. Now Tesla is currently in the middle of a massive strategic pivot. We already know they're shifting production lines at their legacy plants moving away from high-end luxury models to make physical room for the Optimus assembly lines. And Elon spoke of how much work it actually takes to take down and then reset up a new assembly line. He actually got a little bit huffy on one of the calls that came through on the earnings call and it kind of emphasized how much time and effort it actually takes to dismantle these assembly lines and stick those new ones up. But the real spend is in the brain. Tesla is scooping up NVIDIA Blackwell chips at a rate that is pretty much terrifying for the competitors. They're building out massive compute clusters to train the end-to-end neural networks that allow Optimus to navigate a factory floor without being told where every single bolt is. Elon's timeline is aggressive. He wants Optimus to perform a useful task in Tesla's own factories by the end of this year and he's targeting external sales for early 2027. He's betting that the physical labor market is the next infinite economy and with 25 billion dollars backing that bet it's hard to bet against him. But beware, Elon time is very similar to Valve time and maybe we'll actually be able to buy an Optimus around the same time we see the next half-life. But while Tesla is focused on the factory, One X is coming for your front door. If you haven't been following One X, they're the open AI-backed dark horse in this race and they just opened a 58,000 square foot factory in Haywood, California and they're already sold out of their 2026 production run. One X's philosophy is different from Tesla or Figure. They aren't trying to build a Terminator that can lift a truck. They're building Neo, the world's first soft humanoid. Their CEO, Bernd Bohnitsch, is obsessed with the idea of biological mimicry. In a traditional robot, you have heavy rigid motors and loud grinding gearboxes at every joint. If that robot hits you, it doesn't stop. It breaks your arm. Neo, however, uses a tendon-driven system. Imagine your own arm. You don't have a motor in your elbow. You have muscles in your shoulder and bicep that pull on tendons to move the joints. Neo mimics this. It uses higher torque density motors located in the torso and shoulders that pull on higher strength cables, the tendons, to move the limbs. This creates a compliant system. If you push Neo's arm, it gives weight just like a human arm would. It's light, weighing only 30 kilos, about 66 pounds, but it's engineered to lift double its own weight. One of the most interesting details Bernd talked about in his recent factory walkthrough was the delivery experience. People kept asking, how do you even ship a humanoid? You can't exactly put it in a cardboard box and leave it on a Porsche. One X designed what they call the big box. It's a specialized box that arrives at your home. You open it up and because Neo is running on an end-to-end neural network, it actually walks itself out of the box. It's designed to be ready to work the second it enters your home. He also spoke about the possibility of Neo just walking up to your door and ringing the bell with his little charger in his hands. Now that would be a pretty cool delivery, better than my Amazon delivery drivers who throw the package on my doorstep in the pouring rain and then assume that somebody's home. The Neo factory in Heywood is a marvel of vertical integration. They aren't just ordering parts from China and slapping them together. They're winding their own copper coils and building their own motors, which they call the Revo 2. These motors are gearless, meaning the robot is incredibly quiet, operating at just 22 decibels. That's quieter than a library. They've already manufactured over 17,000 of these motors and they're building a workforce that is and clearly the market wants it because those 2026 pre-orders disappeared in just five days. I can't wait to start seeing buyers receive their Neo so we can see them in real-life scenarios. But if One X is the safe home robot, then Figure AI is the superhuman worker. We just got an incredible walkthrough of the Figure headquarters and their BotQ factory from the CEO Brett Adcock. To understand Figure, you have to understand Brett. He's not a hobbyist, he's a serial founder who and then took his flying taxi company, Archer Aviation, public. He's a guy who plays the game at 11 out of 10 and pretty much sleeps at the office, stopping home to spend some time with his family in between work and more work. He even stated that he doesn't care about hitting a few golf balls with friends or catching up with people because he wants to build and win at all costs. He doesn't have time to waste with things like that. He wants to be the next generation of the he's word specifically. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt for now. Figure has moved at a speed that has left the rest of the industry spinning. In March, they hit record production and they're currently on track to triple that by the end of May. Their goal is a million units per year and the tech they're packing into Figure is amazing. Seeing all the Figure bots going through their testing as Brett and Molly from OpenSorcery walk through the factory is pretty mad. And I still think the Figure bot probably looks the best. It definitely looks more advanced, I'd say, than the One X Neo and we haven't really seen much of Optimus to begin with anyway. So let's talk about the Never Fail initiative, also known as the Vulcan project. In the past, if a humanoid robot lost power to a single joint, say a knee motor burned out, the robot would just collapse. That's 150 pound pile of metal falling on your floor. Brett's team has programmed a velocity lock into the neural net. During the walkthrough, they showed a robot losing all communication to its left knee. Instead of falling, the robot instantly recognized the failure and shifted its entire gait to hobble on the broken leg, staying perfectly balanced whilst doing so. It's the kind of resilience you usually only see in biological creatures and it makes complete sense. Brett says that if it loses power to an arm or something, it generally doesn't matter. It might drop something but it's not going to cause a huge accident or hurt somebody. But if it drops a leg muscle suddenly and the robot falls over onto somebody, that's where the problem is. So that's how important it is that the leg stays a bit mobile even if something fails. The design of Figure 3 is also a total departure from Figure 1. Brett jokingly called it the Azempic Robot because it's so much skinnier and sleeker. They managed to reduce the cost by nearly 90% compared to the previous generations by ditching expensive CMC machined metal for more efficient manufacturing processes. If you get a chance to watch the factory walkthrough, I highly recommend it. One of the coolest features of Figure 3 is the charging. They don't use a plug. The robot has inductive coils built into its feet. When it gets low on battery, around 10 or 15%, it autonomously walks over to a charging pad, stands on it and charges through its trainers at 2kW. It can go from empty to full charge in about an hour. They've even built thermal venting into the feet to keep the coils cool while they're pumping that much power. And you know it's only a matter of time before As we've covered before, everything at Figure is controlled by Helix, their vision language action model. A few years ago, the team was writing hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code to try and math the robot into staying balanced. Brett realised that didn't scale. They threw it all away and moved to a pure neural network. Now the robot reasons through camera frames, it sees the world, understands the prompt like clean the living room and the neural network outputs the talk for all 40 plus joints, 200 times a second. No if then statements, just pure intelligence. Even the figure logo has a deep meaning that most people miss. Apparently it's not just a fancy F, it's actually based on the square footprints that the robot leaves in a physical simulation when it's going to walk. It's a nod to the digital origins of physical intelligence. Although seeing that F in that logo is a bit of a, I don't know, poetic license I'll say. Brett's factory is currently a hive of activity and he's making a massive 10 trillion dollar bet. He believes that because half of the world's GDP is human labour, if you can solve the humanoid problem, you build the biggest business in human history. He's not just building a robot, he's building a new category of existence. He's even got secret rooms in the campus that are restricted to almost everyone because the IP they are developing, especially their new dexterous hands, is so valuable. The new hands have human level dexterity with tactile sensors that allow the robot to feel what it's touching, which is the final piece of the puzzle for true artificial general intelligence in the physical world. And Brett thinks he'll bring AGI embodied to the world first. We're watching three titans approach the same problem from three different angles. Tesla has the scale and the raw capital, One X has the safety and the consumer first approach, Figa has the pure engineering speed and the industrial brawn. The ramifications of this are almost too big to process. When these robots start building themselves, which Brett says will happen at Figa within the next two years, the cost of labour drops to near zero. So we're looking at a future where your laundry, your dishes and your grocery runs are handled by a silent 22 decibel assistant that arrived at your front door and walked itself into your life and straight to the living room to tidy up. It's an amazing time but it's also a time of massive disruption. The question isn't if anymore, it's when. And according to the factory floors in Hayward Austin and the Figa campus, the answer is almost but not quite yet. So if you could get one of those three robots in your house now, which do you think you would go for? The soft pliable One X, Figa with its cool trainer foot charging and we've actually seen the good demos of it doing helpful useful tasks or Optimus with all of Elon's promises. Let me know in the comments which one you think you would choose. Don't forget to hit that like button if you want more updates on the Humanoid Revolution and please subscribe to stay ahead of the future. And for staying till the end, enjoy the next clip, see you in the next one.