"Building humanoid robots is Meta's next "AR size bet," a top executive told me recently. That suggests the company plans to spend billions of dollars on the effort. During a recent conversation at Meta's headquarters, CTO Andrew Bosworth said he stood up a robotics "research effort" earlier this year at the direction of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The team's existence has been reported on before, but Bosworth hadn't discussed its strategy in-depth until our interview."
""I don't think the hardware is the hard part," he told me ahead of Meta's recent Connect conference. "I'm not saying the hardware isn't also hard, but it's not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the software." To demonstrate, Bosworth picked up my glass of water from a table between us. "If you know robotics, one of the biggest problems that you have is dexterous manipulation," he said."
Meta established an internal robotics research effort this year to pursue humanoid robots as an "AR-sized" strategic bet with expected multi-billion dollar commitment. The program prioritizes software development over hardware, identifying dexterous manipulation as a central technical challenge. Early prototypes demonstrate locomotion and dynamic movement but struggle with interacting with unstable objects and fine manipulation. The effort leverages existing AI and computer vision expertise and focuses on long-term research, safety, alignment, and integration with broader product ecosystems rather than immediate mass-market hardware deployment.
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