Meta Building Humanoid Robots Could Be This Decade’s Apple Car

Humanoid robots has clearly entered the Oprah phase: you build a humanoid robot! You build a humanoid robot! Everyone build a humanoid robot! According to a story by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who often gets leaks right, Meta is now planning a major investment into building humanoid robots.

Because, of course, that’s the obvious next step for a massive social media company.

While reportedly Meta will develop its own hardware, a core reason for the company’s surprising jump into robots is the success of its AI models, which are critical for helping robots make sense of the world, understand commands, work with humans safely, and accomplish tasks autonomously.

“Our new Robotics product group will focus on research and development in the space of consumer humanoid robots with a goal of maximizing Llama’s platform capabilities,” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth reportedly stated in an internal memo. “The core technologies we've already invested in and built across Reality Labs and AI are complementary to developing the advancements needed for robotics, like hand tracking, material simulation in Gemini, Aria, low-bandwidth, always-on sensors, and more.”

The humanoid robot space is quickly getting cluttered. Just a few weeks ago futurist Peter Diamandis identified 16 leading manufacturers and predicted we’d see humanoid robots helping us in our homes, in beta, by the end of 2026.

Progress is coming fast, with Agility Robotics recently announcing its Digit robot is getting paid to work at customers’ facilities, and Figure CEO Brett Adcock chiming in that just 31 months after incorporating, Figure’s robot was also shipping to paying customers.

(Today he just announced another paying customer via social media.)

Meta is not just a software company. It has some hardware expertise from building products like Quest, Ray-Ban Meta, and AI wearables, Bosworth says in his memo. And he’s bringing on Marc Whitten, a veteran from Unity, Amazon, and Sonos to lead the charge as VP of Robotics. And of course Meta has tens of billions of dollars to invest in future business opportunities.

But taking on a massive project like a humanoid robot is not for the faint of heart. Apple spent more than $10 billion on the Apple Car over the last decade, only to eventually kill the project.

Humanoid robots, however, is a blue ocean field that looks to be central to many if not most of the world’s economies over the next few decades.

“The classical economics that have governed our world are broken,” Diamandis said when I interviewed him recently. “The global GDP is in 2025 is estimated to be about 110 trillion dollars. Half of that is labor, meaning half of that is the the potential market for humanoid robots. Globally, it’s a massive, massive opportunity, which is why we’re seeing so many robot companies coming in and capital being invested into building these companies.”

In other words, if you’re not in humanoid robots, you might not have a seat at the most important table of the next century.

And few giant corporations can abide that, including social media companies.

“We believe that expanding our portfolio to invest in this field will only accrue value to Meta AI and our mixed and augmented reality programs,” says Meta’s Bosworth.

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