Meta Acquires AI Startup ARI for Humanoid Robot Development

Meta has purchased Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a startup company that's building artificial intelligence for robots in order to "address critical challenges" in "high-value labor markets." The company is already working on robot hardware and AI in-house, but a spokesperson told Bloomberg that ARI "will bring a deep expertise in how [it] can design [its] models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control." They didn't reveal the financial details of the acquisition. In a post on X, ARI co-founder Xiaolong Wang said that from the start, they knew achieving his company's goals meant "training a truly general-purpose physical agent." He continued that they now believe the agent will be humanoid and that "scaling will come from learning directly from human experience." Meta, he added, has access to the "key components needed to make this vision possible." Wang, his co-founders Xuxin Cheng and Lerrel Pinto, and the ARI team will be joining Meta's Superintelligence Labs. Pinto also co-founded Fauna Robotics but left the company last year before it was acquired by Amazon for its own humanoid robot project.