Having placed a heavy and immovable tombstone on the metaverse (in the quarter, the division that dealt with it, Reality Lab, continued its hemorrhage with an operating loss of $4.03 billion), Mark Zuckerberg is trying to regain ground in the most lucrative frontier technology. In other words, the one where Meta has so far fallen behind: not only AI but also robotics.
META INVESTS IN ROBOTS
The acquisition (financial terms, as often happens, were not disclosed) of Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup focused on developing artificial intelligence models for humanoid robots, made headlines, along with the obvious possibility for the engineers of the acquired company to have free access to the computational infrastructure of one of the biggest players in the market.
welcome Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) to MSL!
excited to build physical with @LerrelPinto @xiaolonw and the whole team! https://t.co/J3aMiPSNIM
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) May 1, 2026
As far as is known, the Assured Robot Intelligence team will merge into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s research division founded just last year, which was thought to be working only on personal AI agents and the Muse Spark model. But apparently, beyond Artificial Intelligence, they also want to create highly technological devices that give it a physical form. Robots, in other words. And here comes Menlo Park’s latest acquisition.
WHO IS IN ASSURED ROBOT INTELLIGENCE
Founded by two well-known names in the high-tech market such as University of San Diego professor Xiaolong Wang (with a prominent career also at Nvidia) and the director of the General Robotics & AI Lab at New York University Lerrel Pinto, who also co-founded Fauna Robotics acquired by Amazon (another US Big Tech company trying to keep pace in the robotics sector), Assured Robot Intelligence was most likely identified for the brains it brings with it.
MEANWHILE META LAYS OFF
All this while Meta, as is known, is undergoing the largest cutback of its workforce since the infamous “year of efficiency” (words of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg) — those months between 2022 and 2023 when the software house behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp laid off over 20,000 employees. In this case, Menlo Park plans to lay off 8,000 of its employees (the exact number should be known in a few days, by the end of May) and simultaneously has canceled hiring plans for another 6,000 open positions. According to some rumors, the total number of layoffs could reach 20% (about 16,000 workers) by the end of the year.
Many suspect that AI will perform many functions once assigned to flesh-and-blood employees, who currently would even have the obligation to properly train it. Furthermore, the need to save money despite the excellent quarterly results recorded so far would stem precisely from the necessity to tighten purse strings in order to make increasingly massive investments in Artificial Intelligence, with Mark Zuckerberg’s company having committed with President Trump to the monstrous investment of 600 billion dollars on American soil.
