Tesla Optimus, Figure 03 and 1X NEO: how much do they do without a human operator?
When a humanoid pours a drink or folds a towel on camera, a person in another room may be steering it. Tesla, Figure and 1X each describe that differently.
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At Tesla’s We, Robot event on October 10, 2024, Optimus humanoids walked through the crowd, danced, mixed drinks and talked with guests. Some guests assumed the robots were running themselves. The next day it came out that people in another room had been controlling them.
A Morgan Stanley analyst wrote in a note that the bots “relied on tele-ops (human intervention),” and a video from the evening shows an Optimus bartender acknowledging it had human help. Tesla made no statement in that coverage.
Nearly two years later, that evening’s question applies to every company promising a humanoid for factories or homes. When a robot does something on camera, how much of it is the robot? And if one ends up in your home, how often is a person somewhere else looking through its cameras?
Figure once wrote down the count that would settle it. At BMW it tracked interventions, the number of times a human must pause or reset the robot, and set the goal at zero. Tesla, Figure and 1X have each put something on the record about that handoff, and their answers are not alike.
Tesla’s timeline, from its earnings calls
Since then, Optimus has mostly been described in the future tense. On the April 22, 2026 earnings call, Musk said Tesla wanted “to push the Optimus 3 unveil maybe closer to production.” He put Fremont production of the third-generation Optimus “somewhere around the late July, August timeframe” and, on the July 22 call, said “we will soon start production with Optimus.”
The first jobs are modest: “we’re going to start with simple skills in the factory and then build up from there.” Tesla AI executive Ashok Elluswamy described the goal: “You’re going to just ask it to do anything, and then it should just perform the entire task on its own.” The April call gave no figure for how often a person steps in today.
Figure
Where each decision is made
- The linkEvery decision travels out of the machine and back over this. Latency, a dropped connection and an operator looking elsewhere are all failures of the task, and none of them are faults in the machine. A machine run this way is Level I.
- The operatorThe person at the console generates the action sequence. The machine is the actuator.
- Closed on boardThe same loop, entirely inside the machine. Nothing off-board has to be working for it to keep going, which is what makes it eligible for Level III.
Figure’s factory and home trials
Figure publishes more operating detail than either rival, all of it in its own posts. Its earlier robot, Figure 02, spent 11 months at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, loading sheet-metal parts onto a welding fixture through 10-hour shifts, Monday through Friday.
Figure 02 loaded more than 90,000 parts there, on a line that asked for better than 99% success per shift. The forearm was its top hardware failure point, and Figure announced the robot’s retirement. No count was published of the times a person had to pause or reset it.
The successor, Figure 03, was introduced in October 2025 with a soft textile exterior and wireless charging, meant to make it safer and easier to use at home. More than 350 had been delivered by late April 2026. In June one reached Spartanburg to pick, sort and sequence parts for BMW’s assembly lines.
Figure 03 runs Helix, a vision-language-action model that turns camera images and spoken instructions straight into motor commands. When Helix was introduced in February 2025, it had been trained on about 500 hours of teleoperated behavior, recordings of people driving the robots. So its first lessons in working alone came from people at the controls.
In January 2026 Figure released a four-minute sequence of a Figure 03 unloading a dishwasher, putting dishes away across a kitchen and loading the machine again, 61 actions in all. Figure stated that “all videos shown below are fully autonomous, not teleoperated,” with “no resets and no human intervention.”
The largest claim came on September 17. In a post on its Helix 2.5 model, Figure reported sending Figure 03 into 30 Bay Area homes where it had collected no data, to tidy a living room, fold towels and make a bed. A person could halt any run for safety, and a run that needed it counted as a failure.
Pretrained first on Index, Figure’s dataset of human behavior, the robot finished 56% of its attempts, a little better than one in two. A half-done chore earned nothing. Without that pretraining, a model finished 9%. Figure, which ran and reported the test itself, wrote that “the point is not that general humanoid robotics is solved.”
Term
PretrainingTraining a model on a broad set of examples before it is given a particular job, so it starts that job with general skills already learned. In the September test the examples came from Index, which Figure calls a dataset of human behavior. The model that finished 9% of attempts had not been pretrained on them.1X sells the remote operator with the robot
1X opened orders for NEO on October 28, 2025, with priority deliveries due in 2026 and a monthly subscription that ships later. The 66-pound robot has a soft body and would arrive able to open doors, fetch items and turn off the lights.
For a chore NEO does not know, you can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it remotely. That person sees inside your house through the robot’s camera, cannot enter the zones you set, and takes control only with your approval.
Chief executive Bernt Børnich has described two modes in a podcast interview. A chores mode mixes autonomy with remote help. A fully autonomous mode involves no human, and in it, he estimated, door opening succeeds “90 something percent” of the time and fetching about 80%.
Loading a dishwasher, the chore Figure filmed with no one at the controls, has gone less smoothly for NEO in public. In a video that went viral last year, it did the job clumsily with a human teleoperator’s help. 1X’s plan is for the version it ships to operate autonomously by default.
When 1X opened its factory in Hayward, California at the end of April, the first robots off the line went to 1X’s own team for testing in homes. Buyers were told some would get a NEO this year and some later. Orders for 10,000 came in during the five days after launch, about a year of what the plant is built to make.
Where a person takes over
So how much do these robots do without a person? At We, Robot, people were at the controls, and it took outside reporters to say so. Every success rate since has come from the makers themselves: Figure’s 56% in homes it had never seen, and Børnich’s estimates for doors and fetching. Tesla has offered a goal.
The moment a person steps in also means something different at each company. Figure scores it as a failed run. 1X sells it, with rules on what the operator sees and where the operator cannot go. Tesla describes a robot that will one day finish the entire task on its own.
| Robot | Level | What the maker says it does unassisted | When a person steps in | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tesla Optimus Gen 3 | IIAssisted | A goal stated in July 2026: ask it to do anything and it performs the whole task | Outside reporters found the 2024 We, Robot robots were teleoperated | Fremont line being built, unveil moved closer to production start |
| Figure 03 | IIAssisted | 56% full success on three chores in 30 unfamiliar homes (Figure’s own test, September 2026) | A safety stop ends the run and counts as a failure | Over 350 delivered by April 2026, now also at BMW Spartanburg |
| 1X NEO | IIAssisted | Opening doors, fetching items and switching off lights at launch | The owner books a 1X Expert for chores NEO does not know | Listed at $20,000 or $499 a month, early units with 1X staff as of April 2026 |
The count that would let you compare them is the one Figure kept at BMW: pauses and resets per shift, with zero as the target. For NEO, the matching number will be the share of chores owners hand to a 1X Expert once robots reach customers’ homes.
Until one of the three publishes that count, the most direct answer a robot has given came in October 2024, from an Optimus mixing drinks at We, Robot. On camera, it acknowledged being “assisted by a human.”
