After Blocked Manus AI Deal, Meta Eyes Humanoid Robots As Next Big Bet

After

agentic AI, the technology giants have a new obsession. The industry seems to be rushing towards humanoid robots, potentially seeing them as the next future leap. In a similar light, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has acquired a humanoid robots startup, Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI).

How The Deal Works For Meta

The company has not disclosed the financial figures for this acquisition. However, it is an important deal for Meta as China blocked its $2 billion deal to acquire Manus AI last week. Moreover, the move follows Meta shutting down the Metaverse and later it revealed that it could simply no longer introduce updates to Horizon Worlds. Meta’s purchase could address critical shifts in the ‘high-value labour’ markets. As per Bloomberg, the ARI will offer deep expertise about how it can design models and frontier capabilities for the robot control and adopt self-learning to control the whole-body humanoid. In a social media post, Xiaolong Wang, the co-founder of ARI, stated that their goal has been ‘training a truly general-purpose physical agent’.

Moreover, Wang added that the company believes the agent will truly be a humanoid and that level of scaling will be achieved from learning directly from human experience. “We believe this agent will be humanoid — and that scaling will come from learning directly from human experience, not teleoperation alone. Meta’s ecosystem brings together the key components needed to make this vision possible. We will be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) to help bring personal superintelligence into the physical world,” Wang tweeted.Wang and the other co-founders of ARI, Xuxin Cheng and Lerrel Pinto, along with ARI team members, will be joining the Superintelligence Labs division of Meta. Pinto had also co-founded another robotics startup, Fauna Robotics, which was later acquired by Amazon.

Amazon And Tesla Take A Leap In Humanoid Adoption

Apart from Zuckerberg's Meta and Amazon, Tesla has been a key player working on humanoid robots. The Elon Musk-led company decided to stop making Model S and X cars earlier this year, and it plans to convert their production facility in the Fremont factory to produce Optimus humanoid robots instead. The times are almost here where humanoids will be your assistant managing your mundane chores. With tech giants heavily focusing on humanoid robots, their availability could soon become common, just like in China's households.