Kathmandu: Meta has officially entered the age of robots. On May 1, 2026, the company confirmed the full acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a specialist robotics AI startup, with its entire team now absorbed into Meta’s internal structure. This move marks Meta’s most aggressive step into Meta Physical AI Robotics, a shift away from digital assistants and virtual reality toward machines that can physically navigate and interact with the real world.
The ARI team is led by co-founders Lerrel Pinto, formerly of Fauna Robotics, and Xiaolong Wang, a veteran of Nvidia and a researcher at UC San Diego. Their expertise lies in self-learning systems and whole-body control, focusing on robots that adapt in real time rather than following pre-programmed movements. Inside Meta, the team has been placed across two divisions. Meta Superintelligence Labs is where the team develops the AI brain, specifically a new type of model called Vision-Language-Action models, internally referred to as Llama-P or Physical. Meta Robotics Studio is where that brain is tested on Meta’s own humanoid hardware prototypes, ensuring the software and hardware work together as one system.
The technical ambition behind Meta Physical AI Robotics goes well beyond what current AI can do. The Llama-P model is being built to understand a robot’s own body, sensing motor torque and finger friction, and to operate in completely new environments, such as an unfamiliar kitchen, and complete tasks through reasoning alone without specific prior training for that space. Supporting this work, Meta has already released tools including SAM 3, which tracks any object in real-time video even when partially hidden, and Meta Locate 3D, which allows robots to find and pick up objects based on simple spoken instructions such as “hand me the blue mug behind the toaster.”
Meta’s long-term goal in Meta Physical AI Robotics is not simply to build its own robots but to become the foundational platform for the entire robotics industry, licensing its AI models and sensor systems to other manufacturers, much like Android became the operating system for the global smartphone market. To fund this vision, Meta has raised its 2026 capital expenditure to between $125 billion and $145 billion, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg directly linking the investment to workforce reductions made possible by AI efficiency gains.
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