Meta Acquires Robotics AI Startup As It Makes The Push Into Humanoid Machines
Meta has purchased Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a startup that develops artificial intelligence for robots to “address critical challenges” in “high-value labor markets.” The company is already working on robotics hardware and AI in-house, but a spokesperson said Bloomberg that ARI “will bring deep expertise in how [it] can design [its] state-of-the-art models and capabilities for robot control and self-learning up to full-body humanoid control. “They did not reveal the financial details of the acquisition.
In an article on He added that they now believe the agent will be humanoid and that “scaling will come from learning directly from human experience.” Meta, he added, has access to the “key elements needed to make this vision possible.” Wang, his co-founders Xuxin Cheng and Lerrel Pinto, and the ARI team will join Meta’s superintelligence labs. Pinto also co-founded Fauna Robotics, but left the company last year before it was acquired by Amazon for its own humanoid robot project.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said in 2025 the company aims to create software that other companies can license, similar to what Google is doing with Android. “The software is the bottleneck,” he explained. He said the plan was to start by developing software that could operate a dexterous hand, and then expand the technology from there. Besides Meta and Amazon, Tesla has also been working on humanoid robots for some time now. The automaker decided to stop production of Model S and X cars earlier this year and convert its production space in the Fremont factory to make Optimus humanoid robots.
