Humanoid robots are the next “plant of the size AR”

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Building humanoid robots is another “plant of the size AR”, the best executive director recently told me. This suggests that the company plans to spend billions of dollars on effort.

During a recent conversation at the META CTO headquarters, Andrew Bosworth said that he approached the “research efforts” of robotics at the beginning of this year towards the general director Marek Zuckerberg. The existence of the team was reported earlier, but Bosworth did not discuss his strategy thoroughly to our conversation.

“I don’t think the equipment is a difficult part,” he told me before the last Meta Connect conference. “I am not saying that the equipment is also not difficult, but it is not a bottleneck. The bottleneck is software.”

To demonstrate, Bosworth picked up a glass of water from the table between us. “If you know robotics, one of the biggest problems you have is skillful manipulation,” he said. “These robots can stand, can run, they can reverse because the earth is super stable.” However, a robot trying to lift a glass of water, probably “crushed it immediately or spilled all the water.”

While Meta is currently building its own humanoid or “metabot”, as it is called internally, Bosworth predicts that the company licenses its software platform to other robot manufacturers. “I don’t care that we are manufacturers of equipment,” he explained. Instead, Meta plans to approach him similarly to Google, which licenses its software for phone developers. According to Bosworth, the idea for the development of BluePrint software and permission to each company operate it “as long as your robot meets these specifications.”

He said that the recent AI Superinteligence Meta laboratory cooperates with the Robotics group to build a “world model” that can “simulate software required to animate a skillful hand”. (Demis Hassabis Google Deepmind also often talked about its purpose to build a global model that brings spatial awareness to AI.) “The sensor loop does not exist” so that humanoid can carefully download the key set from the pockets of jeans, such as man, explained Bosworth. “So you need to build this set of data.”

“We wouldn’t do it if we didn’t have a laboratory if we didn’t think we would build models that could do it,” he said, referring to a recent team led by former general director Alexandr Wang.

When I asked about the approach of Elon Musk with Optimus, Bosworth said that building humanoids would not work in the same way that Tesla built her independent platform: “Listen, we do not do Lidar. People came up with a vision, and therefore we can do it with enough data.” I see Tesla cars receive enough data.

Marc Whitten, former general director of Cruise, is the leading team of Robotics Meta. “A true story is a talent that we were able to pull,” according to Bosworth. He emphasized Sangbae Kim – “the greatest tactical worker in the game” – whose meta hired a myth at the beginning of this year. He also told the story of the belief of Jinsong Yu, an older meta engineer who archived the ORion AR Glasses prototype software so as not to retire and join the team. And Ning Li, a 15-year-old company veteran, is now running an engineering team for robotics.

Based on my conversation with Bosworth, it seems that the finish line still has a lot to understand about its strategy of robotics. He mentioned how “a group of people competing as a spinal supplier” for silicoid humanoids, such as Nvidia and Qualcomm, and that the finish “considers all these songs.” And although he formulated an effort in the same category as billions that the meta spends on AR, Bosworth seemed to underestimate the need for a robot, which is as skillfully advanced as Optimus Tesla.

“I don’t think you need 23 degrees of freedom in your hand. Two thumbs would be nice. I only need two thumbs.”