So, like a large scale scam to get your "downpayment" ? How would remote human operators scale, especially for the $20k "ownership" model? I presume the actual hardware probably costs them at least $10k to make, so after about 400 hours of "remote operator use", it's all loss on the company? I suspect they have a limit on use, or a pay-to-use-remotely thing they neglected to announce.
There is no way that the $500/mo or $20k flat price points are profitable. Cash influx is definitely important, but it seems to me that the real "value" from deploying with remote operators to handle any interesting tasks is in building an in-home data moat.
There are a lot of best cases in the above. Time will tell if it works. I'm not betting on it, but I'm cautious so don't read too much into that.