Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms has moved beyond trying to connect humans and is ready to focus on building robotic ones. According to a report from Bloomberg, Meta is planning to pour money into a new project to build AI-powered humanoid robots.
Meta reportedly plans to start the project by building a robot capable of completing household chores. But long term, it seems the company is more interested in being in the software business rather than dealing with hardware, with a focus on developing the AI that will power these machines. Basically, Meta wants to make the brains and leave the bodies up to robotics companies. It doesn’t currently have ambitions to build its own Meta-branded bot, per Bloomberg, and has already started holding conversations with firms like Unitree Robotics and Figure AI.
The effort will be headed up by Marc Whitten, who was serving as CEO of self-driving car company Cruise before resigning earlier this month when parent company General Motors decided to get out of the robotaxi business.
Whitten’s team will fall under Meta’s Reality Labs division, which is coming off a modest success with its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, managing to sell one million pairs last year. Prior to that, the department was best known for burning through $50 billion over the course of four years in an attempt to make the Metaverse a thing. They did successfully use that money to give VR avatars legs but didn’t really get too far past that.
Once it became clear that AI was going to be a big deal, Meta pivoted its Reality Labs department increasingly in that direction, because if you’re burning through money on the thing everyone is burning money on then no one really notices. And the company reportedly believes it has a good base of data from its VR and AR experiments to help develop AI for humanoid robots. After all, it’s been collecting data on how humans see and interact with the world through its devices.
Last year, it announced that it would start collecting “anonymized” data from Oculus headsets including information about “hand, body, and eye tracking” and “physical environments.” Additionally, any photo or video taken through the lens of Meta’s Ray-Bans gets used to further train its AI systems.
Now the company will try to turn all that data into the basis for software that can power humanoid robots. Meta reportedly believes these bots are still several years away from being available, and that it’s even farther out from being able to serve as the underpinning AI that will be used by robotics companies for their machines. But if there is anyone who knows how to act like a human while not fully being one, it’s Mark Zuckerberg.