According to a report from a tech newsletter, Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth said in a recent talk that the company wants to become the software “backbone” of humanoid robots. Bosworth explained that he is not focused on Meta becoming a hardware manufacturer itself but rather on licensing its software to other manufacturers. He believes that while hardware is difficult, the real bottleneck for humanoid robots is the software. This approach, if it materializes, could be similar to Google’s model with its Android operating system, which is used on a vast majority of the world’s smartphones even though its own Pixel phones have a small market share.
Bosworth said that the company’s robotics efforts would be Meta’s next “AR size bet.” To put this in context, Meta has reportedly committed over $100 billion in cumulative investment into its augmented and virtual reality (XR) portfolio. A source familiar with the project told a publication that it could be years before Meta’s platform is ready to power third-party robotics.
The Challenge of Dexterity and a Long-Term Vision
So far, humanoid robots have struggled with tasks that require dexterity, such as manipulating unstable objects. Bosworth explained that a robot attempting to pick up a glass of water would likely “immediately crush it or spill all the water,” and would also struggle with a simple task like grabbing car keys from a pocket. 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.”
Despite the challenges, Meta is not the only tech giant that is bullish about the future of humanoid robots. At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted that the market could reach $38 billion in the coming decades, claiming that the “ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner.”
What The Author Thinks
Meta’s strategy to become the software “backbone” of robotics is a familiar and highly ambitious play to dominate a new computing platform. By positioning itself as the Android of humanoid robots, Meta is learning from Google’s success and is trying to secure a dominant position before the market even fully materializes. This is a smart, capital-efficient way to enter a high-risk market, but it pits Meta against other giants who have similar ambitions, setting the stage for a new kind of “ecosystem war” that will determine who controls the future of embodied AI. The success of this strategy hinges on Meta’s ability to solve the core software challenges of dexterity and natural interaction, a task that has proven to be incredibly difficult for everyone in the field.
Featured image credit: Heute
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