Meta has bought Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a startup building AI models for robots, according to Bloomberg. The team will join Meta Superintelligence Labs to help push forward the company’s work on humanoid robots. Meta didn’t disclose what it paid for ARI.
The deal brings over ARI’s entire staff, including co-founders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang. In a post on X, Wang said ARI has been chasing “physical AGI”—artificial general intelligence built for the real world—since launching a year ago. Customer projects made it clear that getting there requires a universal physical agent, and humanoid designs work best for the job. The system should learn directly from human experience, not just teleoperation, Wang said.
Meta is building its own hardware, sensors, and software for humanoid robots and plans to license the tech to other companies, much like Google did with Android in the smartphone market. Tesla, Google, and Amazon are also pouring money into humanoid robotics.
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