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Facebook parent Meta Platforms is planning to invest heavily in humanoid robots powered by AI that it intends to be capable of carrying out household tasks, the company said in a memo to staff.
Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth said in the memo that the company would be creating a new robotics product group within its Reality Labs division to focus on research and development involving “consumer humanoid robots with a goal of maximising Llama’s platform capabilities”, referring to Meta’s Llama family of AI models.
The new group is to be led by Marc Whitten, the former chief executive of General Motors’ Cruise self-driving car company, who left Cruise earlier this month.
Robotics platform
“The core technologies we’ve already invested in and built across Reality Labs and AI are complementary to developing the advancements needed for robotics,” Bosworth wrote.
“We believe that expanding our portfolio to invest in this field will only accrue value to Meta AI and our mixed and augmented reality programmes.”
He said technologies such as hand tracking, computing at low bandwidth and always-on sensors have already been developed by Meta and could be applied to robots.
Meta’s broader ambition is to create a platform for humanoid robotics that can be widely used by third parties, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.
The platform would include the AI driving the system, as well as sensors, software and hardware to be manufactured and sold by a wide range of companies, the report said.
Meta has reportedly begun discussing the plans with robotics companies including Unitree Robotics and Figure AI, and doesn’t initially plan on producing a Meta-branded robot, but may do so in the future.
Whitten is to report directly to Bosworth and is expected to hire around 100 engineers, the report said.
Meta said last month it planned to invest up to $65 billion (£52bn) in AI infrastructure, which Bloomberg’s report said would include the work on robotics.
Reality Labs makes hardware such as Quest VR headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Real-world tasks
Tesla has demonstrated humanoid robots that it said it eventually plans to offer to consumers, while Amazon, Apple, Google and other large tech companies have also been exploring robotics.
The current wave of investment in AI has focused on generative AI tools that work with images or text, or can carry out online tasks, but tools that can perform activities in the physical world are more challenging, especially in environments such as homes, which unlike warehouses or public roads are not standardised.
Last September well-known Stanford AI researcher Li Fei-Fei raised $230m from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures for a start-up called World Labs that aims to create AI that can interact with and understand the three-dimensional world.
The company aims to build what it calls “large world models”, which it contrasts to the language-based approach of large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots such as ChatGPT.
