Meta wants to become the software “backbone” of humanoid robots in the future, according to the tech giant’s technology boss. Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth said in a recent talk at the company’s headquarters, reported by tech newsletter Sources, that he doesn’t care about Meta being a hardware manufacturer itself, but wants to focus on licensing its software to other manufacturers.
This approach, if it materializes, might not look too similar to Google’s take on the smartphone space. Google’s Android is used on about 72.5% of the world’s smartphones, despite its branded Pixel smartphones accounting for only around 2% of the global smartphone market.
“I don’t think the hardware is the hard part,” he said. “I’m not saying the hardware isn’t also hard, but it’s not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the software.”
We’ve heard reports of Meta wanting to take over this emerging space earlier this year, but Bosworth said the company’s robotics efforts would be Meta’s next “AR size bet.” To put this in context, Meta is thought to have committed over $100 billion in cumulative investment into its augmented and virtual reality (XR) portfolio, which includes projects like the newly released Meta Ray-Ban Display.
The exec also talked about some of the challenges the company is working on, such as the software simulation required to animate a dexterous hand.
So far, although humanoid robots have had great success in some fields, they’ve struggled when it comes to manipulating unstable objects. Bosworth explained that a robot trying to pick up a glass of water would likely “immediately crush it or spill all the water,” and would also struggle with relatively simple tasks like grabbing a pair of car keys from a jeans pocket.
He explained Meta’s new Superintelligence AI lab is working with the company’s robotics group to build what he calls a “world model” that can “do the software simulation required to animate a dexterous hand.”
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Despite Meta’s big ambitions, it could be a long way until plans turn into something available to consumers. Earlier this year, a source with knowledge of the project told Bloomberg that it “could be years” before Meta’s platform is ready to power third-party robotics.
Meanwhile, Meta isn’t the only tech giant that remains extremely bullish about the future of humanoid robots. At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted the market could hit $38 billion in the coming decades, claiming “the ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner.”
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