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Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said robotics could be an “AR-sized bet”
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Meta Platforms CTO Andrew Bosworth said at the end of September that their robotics investment could be an “AR-sized bet”.
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Meta wants to focus on the software part.
“I don’t think the hardware is the hard part,” Bosworth said. “I’m not saying the hardware isn’t also hard, but it’s not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the software.”
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Bosworth pointed out that robots currently struggle with simple tasks such as picking a glass of water or grabbing a pair of car keys from a jeans pocket.
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He said the robotics group is working with the new Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL) to build a “world model” that can “do the software simulation required to animate a dexterous hand."
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted at CES 2025 that humanoid robots market could hit $38 billion in the coming decades.
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Meta is said to have spent over $100 billion in AR and VR portfolio so far.
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Bloomberg reported earlier this year that Meta’s next big bet is AI-powered humanoid robots and that it is expected to hire 100 engineers this year.
Assessment
While the opportunity from humanoid robots is massive and is in line with Meta’s current focus on superintelligence, it represents capital and execution risk like in the case of Metaverse, especially now that that the company is going through a capital intensive period for AI. However, Meta could be planning to double down on it once it achieves superintelligence (since commentary on capital allocation has been largely on AI), which makes sense.