Meta wants to become the Android of robotics (www.engadget.com)

Meta is quietly moving from AR to robotics research, with CTO Andrew Bosworth telling reporters the company is building a "Metabot" but is primarily targeting software licensing rather than hardware production — positioning itself as the “Android of robotics.” The effort is being led by Marc Whitten (ex-Cruise) alongside Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. Early work centers on creating a unified “world model” that can run the simulations needed to animate dexterous hands, and the company has explored household use cases (cleaning, folding laundry), though products are likely far off. For the AI/ML community this matters because Meta is betting that software — not hardware — is the current bottleneck for general-purpose robots. A commercially licensed robotics stack from a major cloud-and-model provider could accelerate hardware diversity, standardize interfaces for perception, control and simulation, and amplify demand for large-scale multimodal models, physics-informed simulators, and dexterous manipulation research. It also raises practical questions about safety, benchmarking, and who controls the stack (ecosystem vs. proprietary). Competing moves from Apple, Tesla and others mean the next phase of robotics may center on scalable model-based control and simulation infrastructure rather than on bespoke robot bodies.