Meta is making another “AR size bet” and plans to invest billions of dollars in building humanoid robots. While the company is working on a “Metabot”, its goal is bigger than just making hardware.

The software backbone for humanoid robots is Meta’s next big goal

Meta has started what it calls a “research effort” in robotics earlier this year, and despite building a humanoid robot, that’s not its main goal. The company’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, said in aninterviewwith Sources’ Alex Heath that his vision is for a software platform that could be licensed to other companies that manufacture the hardware. That idea would function similarly to how Google provides Android to smartphone manufacturers. Meta wants to develop a software blueprint that any company that builds a robot with certain specs could use. Bosworth says that software is the bigger challenge to robotics.To solve the challenges humanoid robots face, Bosworth’s team is collaborating with the Superintelligence AI lab at Meta. They’re building what he calls a “world model”, which would help “do the software simulation required to animate a dexterous hand.” 

He explained that one of the biggest issues for robotics is building a hand that could pick up a glass of water or take a set of keys out of a pocket. Unlike walking and doing backflips, these actions require operating with an unstable object, which proves challenging for current humanoid robots. There’s no “sensor loop” for that task, so the company will have to build a data set for it, Bosworth said.

Another big bet from Meta

To give some context about the scale of this effort, Meta has reportedly invested over $100 billion in Reality Labs, its augmented and virtual reality division. As a result, we’ve seen the recently announced Meta Ray-Ban Display and the prototype of Project Orion. The company has also spent billions on its Superintelligence AI lab, including a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI.