Popular food blogger Nick DiGiovanni recently went head-to-head with several robots in a cooking challenge. His main competitor was NEO Beta, a humanoid android operated by engineers from the company 1X.
The task was to cook a perfect medium-rare steak. To the engineers' surprise, NEO Beta succeeded on the first try, though it occasionally needed Nick's help. The robot immediately knocked over a bottle of olive oil, and later, Nick had to cut the vegetables for the garnish himself.
NEO Beta was controlled using VR Teleoperation technology based on Meta Quest, with GPT-4 handling its voice generation.
1X noted that cooking isn't a primary skill for NEO Beta. Before handling sharp objects, it must master safer tasks. However, these initial culinary experiments are seen as a success.