Meta acquires robotics startup to strengthen humanoid AI ambitions

Social media giant Meta has announced that it has acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum.

“We have acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the forefront of robotic intelligence designed to help robots understand, predict, and adapt to human behavior in complex, dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.

ARI’s team, including its co-founders, will join the research arm of Meta’s AI arm, Superintelligence Labs. ARI had previously raised an undisclosed seed round from AI seed company AIX Ventures.

The startup was building a basic model of a humanoid robot that could perform all kinds of manual labor, including housework. Co-founder Xiaolong Wang is a former researcher at Nvidia, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. Co-founder Lerel Pinto, who previously taught at New York University and co-founded child-sized humanoid robot startup Fauna Robotics before Amazon acquired it last month, has won a string of prestigious awards.

ARI supports Meta’s humanoid ambitions. “This team, led by Leler Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, brings deep expertise in how to design models and frontier features for self-learning robot control and whole-body humanoid control.”

Meta-researchers have been working on humanoid robot technology for many years. A leaked memo a year ago discussed Meta’s ambitions to develop such robots, including AI models and hardware, for consumers.

Even if Meta does not release a consumer humanoid product, many AI experts these days believe that the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the theoretical reach where AI reaches or exceeds human-level intelligence in any domain, requires training AI models in the physical world and requires robots to learn through direct interaction rather than data alone.

ARI and Fauna’s deal reflects a broader industry sprint with wildly different forecasts, from Goldman Sachs’ forecast of $38 billion by 2035 to Morgan Stanley’s forecast of $5 trillion by 2050, but the spread reflects both the enormous potential and the uncertainty surrounding a technology that is still gaining a foothold.