All-In

The $1/Hour Worker: Four Robotics CEOs on Humanoids at Home, China's Threat, and the End of Dangerous Jobs

with Peter Funkhouser (Anybotics) & Bernt Børing (1X)
28 Jul 2026 4 min read ~30m (transcript segment)
TL;DR

Anybotics CEO Peter Funkhouser explains how four-legged inspection robots running in explosive oil-and-gas environments already deliver superhuman sensing at zero Chinese supply chain exposure, while 1X CEO Bernt Børing reveals Neo will ship to consumers in 2026 at $500/month and that 1X's core bet is pre-training on general internet video by making Neo physically close enough to a human to leverage all of humanity's existing video data.

Key Moments
Peter Funkhouser
“We built a special robot that's guaranteed not to create a spark.”
Funkhouser describing Anybotics' ATEX-rated robot designed for methane-filled explosive atmospheres in oil and gas facilities.
▶ 7:21
Peter Funkhouser
“You don't want to have 15 cameras in your critical infrastructure that somebody else controls.”
Funkhouser explaining why Chinese robotics platforms are a data-security risk for nuclear and energy customers.
▶ 11:11
Bernt Børing
“All of the major breakthroughs that we've seen as far as I'm aware of in AI have been because someone figured out how to use a huge new data source that previously we were not able to use.”
Børing making the case that general internet video is the next massive unlocked data source for robotics, analogous to past AI breakthroughs.
▶ 27:35
Bernt Børing
“The only way to do that is you have to care about every single tiny detail of the robot to be as close to human as possible.”
Børing explaining 1X's core thesis: matching human morphology is the unlock that lets them train on the internet's vast general video data.
▶ 28:03
Bernt Børing
“Our cross embodiment is not another robot. Our cross embodiment is the human.”
Børing contrasting 1X's training strategy against competitors who cross-train across different robot form factors.
▶ 29:01
About the show
›
All-In is a tech and business podcast hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. This special episode was recorded live at Machina, an AI-in-the-real-world conference in Paris, and features back-to-back interviews with robotics CEOs on humanoid robots, industrial inspection, and the China threat.
Takeaways
1
Zero Chinese supply chain is a customer requirement, not just politics Anybotics sources 0% of its robot from China, partly by historical design and partly because customers operating critical infrastructure — nuclear, oil and gas, offshore wind — explicitly won't allow Chinese-controlled hardware with cameras inside their facilities. Data sovereignty is becoming a purchasing criterion that shapes the entire hardware supply chain.
2
Humanoid form factor unlocks internet-scale training data 1X CEO Bernt Børing argues the decisive competitive advantage of a human-shaped robot isn't ergonomics — it's data. Because Neo's hands, proportions, and movements mirror a human's, 1X can pre-train on the entire corpus of human video on the internet, an orders-of-magnitude larger dataset than any robot-specific collection. This is their answer to the robotics data catch-22.
3
Inspection robots deliver ROI through superhuman sensing, not labor arbitrage Anybotics' ANYmal succeeds because it perceives things humans cannot — micro gas leaks, thermal anomalies, acoustic signatures — not because it replaces headcount. Industrial assets that go offline cost hundreds of thousands per hour, so even expensive robots ($100K+) pay for themselves quickly. The business model is selling uptime insurance, not cheaper workers.