Meta is tapping top talent into robotics efforts, including the leader behind its smart glasses (www.businessinsider.com)

Meta has quietly shifted a top hardware leader into its nascent robotics effort: Li-Chen Miller, who ran Meta’s smart-glasses portfolio (including the Orion prototype), is now the first product manager for Reality Labs’ newly formed Robotics group. The move follows other high-profile engineering hires—MIT roboticist Sangbae Kim, Orion software architect Jinsong Yu, and engineering lead Ning Li—and roughly 40 robotics job listings for roles from AI research scientists to robotics product operations. Internally the team is building a humanoid “Metabot” intended for household tasks, and is coordinating with Meta’s Superintelligence Lab (led by Alexandr Wang) to develop a learned “world model” that can drive dextrous movement. For the AI/ML community this signals Meta doubling down on integrated hardware-software robotics, blending its AR/VR and wearables experience with large-scale AI research. Key technical implications include a focus on data-driven paradigms for perception, control and manipulation, tight coupling between learned world models and low-level motor control, and the need for simulation, large datasets and compute to train dexterity-capable agents. The cross-pollination of product, robotics and superintelligence talent suggests Meta aims to tackle end-to-end robot systems (from sensors and actuators to learned planners), which raises interesting research opportunities—and risks—around safety, scalability and compute-cost tradeoffs in real-world robotic deployment.