Social media giant Meta has recently announced the official acquisition of humanoid robot startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), aiming to strengthen its cutting-edge capabilities in robot understanding and prediction of human behavior in complex and dynamic environments. After the acquisition, the core team of ARI, including co-founder Xiaolong Wang (former researcher at NVIDIA and associate professor at the University of California, San Diego) and Leila Pinto (former professor at New York University), will be fully integrated into Meta's Superintelligence Labs.

ARI previously received a seed round of funding from AIX Ventures. Its core business focuses on building foundational models for humanoid robots, enabling them to perform various physical tasks such as household chores. A Meta spokesperson stated that the team's deep expertise in robot control, self-learning models, and full-body humanoid robot control technology will directly help Meta achieve its strategic goal of developing humanoid robots with hardware and model collaboration. Previous leaked memos had indicated that Meta had already initiated internal research plans for AI robots in the consumer market.

Industry analysis generally believes that Meta's move reflects a consensus in the field of artificial intelligence towards "embodied intelligence," meaning that the realization of general artificial intelligence (AGI) requires models to be trained through direct interaction in the physical world, rather than relying solely on digital data.

With Amazon's recent acquisition of a company in the same field, Fauna Robotics, capital activities in the humanoid robot industry are accelerating significantly. Although there is a huge discrepancy in the valuation forecasts for this industry between 2035 and 2050 (ranging from 38 billion to 5 trillion dollars), the frequent entry of major players clearly shows the strategic value of physical intelligence as the next breakthrough in AI.