Facebook’s parent company Metaplatform moves beyond trying to connect people, ready to focus on building robots. According to a Bloomberg report, Meta plans to pour money into a new project to build humanoid robots powered by AI.
Meta reportedly plans to launch the project by building a robot that can complete the household chores. However, in the long run, the company appears to be more interested in joining the software business rather than dealing with hardware, focusing on developing AI that powers these machines. Essentially, Meta wants to build a brain and leave the body to a robotics company. Currently, there is no ambition to build a unique metabrand bot for each Bloomberg. We are also already beginning to hold conversations with companies such as Unitree Robotics and Figure AI.
The effort will be led by Mark Witten, CEO of autonomous car company Cruises before parent company General Motors resigned earlier this month when he decided to step out of the Lobotaki business.
Whitten’s teams fall under the Reality Labs category of Meta. It has achieved modest success with Metaray-Ban Smart Glasses, allowing it to sell 1 million pairs last year. Previously, the division was best known for burning $50 billion over four years to make Metaverse a thing. They managed to use the money to give them the legs of a VR avatar, but they didn’t go too far past that.
When it became clear that AI would be a big deal, Meta increasingly pivoted the real-life lab department in that direction. And it is reportedly believed that there is a good foundation for data from VR and AR experiments to help develop humanoid robot AI. After all, it collects data on how humans see and interact with the world through that device.
Last year, it announced that it would begin collecting “anonymized” data from Oculus headsets that contain information about “hands, body and eyes” and “physical environment.” Furthermore, photos and videos taken through Meta’s Ray-Ban lenses are used to further train AI systems.
Now, the company is trying to turn all its data into a software foundation that can run humanoid robots. Meta believes these bots are a few years away from being still available, and even further away from acting as the underlying AI used by robotics companies in their machines. But if anyone knows that they’re not entirely alone in how to act like a human, it’s Mark Zuckerberg.
