TL;DR
The robot butler of 1950s magazine covers can now be ordered and, by one report, delivered. 1X's NEO humanoid costs $20,000 or $499 a month and has reportedly shipped to its first early-access buyers. The catch is that, in early hands-on testing, it could not finish a single household chore without a human operator steering it remotely. That arrangement may be the point: every chore a remote human completes through the robot's body is also training data, which is what the industry is racing to collect. If that data turns into robots that work alone, the household helper becomes ordinary within a decade. If it does not, the first wave of home humanoids will be expensive telepresence machines. Meanwhile, a new federal rule is keeping new foreign-made robots out of U.S. stores, which shapes who gets to sell the first ones.
Below the line, for paid subscribers: The full story: where it stands, how we got here and what's dated next; our Odds board on 5 milestones, starting with "An independent review of a NEO delivered to a paying buyer is published by 2026"; our labeled speculation on what it adds up to; and every source.