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Relentless · 3 min · Sep 18, 2026

Social behavior can emerge without task-specific examples

Bernt Børnich says 1X's model can learn social cues from broader behavior data, not just examples of a specific task. In a handoff, the robot waits until a person takes the bag before letting go.

Bernt Børnich

Bernt Børnich is founder and CEO of 1X.

  • Ti Morse, Host · Host, Relentless

    Interviews hard-tech founders on Relentless; guests include Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong and Hadrian's Chris Power.

About this segment

Bernt Børnich says 1X's model can learn social cues from broader behavior data, not just examples of a specific task. In a handoff, the robot waits until a person takes the bag before letting go.

From “Manufacturing 50,000 Humanoid Robots Next Year | Bernt Børnich, 1X”, Sep 18, 2026. Watch the full episode

“the robot doesn't have data of the specific tasks it's just these kind of like social behaviors and how to interact with people just falls out of the model”
Bernt Børnichat 21:36 · Relentless21:36

Takeaways

  1. The handoff behavior was not trained on that specific task.
  2. He expects social interaction to emerge from broad model training.
  3. He sees trust and warmth as important parts of robot intelligence.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 9:12In-house manufacturing lets 1X iterate in four weeks2:47
  2. 13:19The best robot design removes complexity4:00
  3. 31:08General-purpose robots need diverse data6:00
  4. 0:00Humanoid production has fewer parts but more deployment variance3:53
  5. 5:431X wants one model to generalize across tasks3:38
  6. 16:58Small engineering teams keep product complexity down3:16

  7. 20:13Social behavior can emerge without task-specific examples2:59

  8. 28:51Robots should learn the world, not copy human behavior2:26Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 20:19

    ideally this is something that humans like form a connection with and they start to love. One of the videos that I saw, you were like hugging Neo. And I was thinking to myself, how do you go through the process of trying to design something that is fundamentally something that humans can learn to love or decide to love yeah so there's there's the obvious answer which is like oh you do the right things with respect to like warmth and materials and it's easy to design things that are scary and then they look kind of science fiction and modern because they're scary like that's kind of like the simple cheat code we don't do that we try to design things with warmth like technology that just blends into society and you shouldn't even think about it as technology like that would be the success so that's kind of like on the hardware side um and

  2. 21:03

    that's hard to do but i think it's pretty straightforward um i think on the intelligence side it's incredibly interesting and one of the things i'm so bullish on with the world models and what we're doing there is the robot actually learns social behaviors also through all this data and a good example is just like if you get the robot to like i mean there's some bags over there and we have the robot to go and like give you a goodie bag of swag um it hands it to you and it doesn't let go right and then you grab the handle and then the robot lets go and there's there's no data in the training there right the robot doesn't have data of the specific tasks it's just these kind of like social behaviors and how to interact with people just falls out of the model body language falls out of the model like everything kind of collapses into one big omni model that

  3. 21:54

    understands everything from how to do the task but also how to like how to be social um how to simulate other agents like other people like if you want to move around and do things in an efficient manner then you need to understand and predict what other people do right uh and we do of the intelligence is very very interesting but also very very hard to get right i think ultimately that will matter a lot right because that's how you create the trust that's how you kind of like create that warmth and i think it's also going to be quite individual like people don't like it's personalizable like people don't necessarily want the exact same thing but i do think that these machines will they will learn and last for a long time and they will become a part of the family and a part of society and it's going to be very interesting

  4. 22:47

    to see how that evolves. I think it's going to be quite beautiful to have this companion throughout your life that is always on your side, remembers everything that's happened and it's always there for you and I think we could all need that. I think there's very few products that most people would describe as delightful to have in their lives