Humanoid Robots Are Meta's Next 'AR-Sized Bet'

Meta is making humanoid robots its next massive 'AR-sized bet,' investing billions into a project led by top roboticists. The focus will be less on hardware and more on software dexterity, aiming to license its robotics platform to manufacturers much like Google licenses Android. The Verge reports: During a recent conversation at Meta's headquarters, CTO Andrew Bosworth said he stood up a robotics 'research effort' earlier this year at the direction of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The team's existence has been reported on before, but Bosworth hadn't discussed its strategy in-depth until our interview. 'I don't think the hardware is the hard part,' he told me ahead of Meta's recent Connect conference. 'I'm not saying the hardware isn't also hard, but it's not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the software.'

To demonstrate, Bosworth picked up my glass of water from a table between us. 'If you know robotics, one of the biggest problems that you have is dexterous manipulation,' he said. 'These robots, they can stand, they can run, they can do a flip, because the ground is a super stable thing.' By contrast, a robot trying to pick up the glass of water would likely 'immediately crush it or spill all the water.' While Meta is currently building its own humanoid, or 'Metabot' as it's called internally, Bosworth envisions the company licensing its software platform to other robot manufacturers. 'I don't care about us being the hardware manufacturers,' he explained.

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