Meta has acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum, the social media giant said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments,\u201d a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.<\/p>\n
ARI\u2019s team, including its co-founders, will join Meta\u2019s AI unit, the Superintelligence Labs research division. ARI had raised an undisclosed seed round from AI seed firm AIX Ventures.<\/p>\n
The startup was building foundation models for humanoid robots to perform all types of physical labor such as household chores. Co-founder Xiaolong Wang was previously a researcher at Nvidia, and an associate professor at UC San Diego, with a list of prestigious awards to his name. Co-founder Lerrel Pinto, who previously taught at NYU and co-founded the kid-size humanoid startup Fauna Robotics before Amazon snapped it up last month, has also won a string of prestigious awards.<\/p>\n
ARI will help Meta with its humanoid ambitions. \u201cThis team, led by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, will bring a deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meta researchers have been working on humanoid robotics tech for years. A leaked memo from a year ago discussed Meta\u2019s ambitions to build such a robot, including AI models and hardware, aimed at consumers.<\/p>\n
Even if Meta never releases a consumer humanoid product, many AI experts these days believe that the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) \u2014 the theoretical point at which AI reaches or surpasses human-level intelligence across all domains \u2014 will require training AI models in the physical world, where robots learn through direct interaction rather than data alone.<\/p>\n