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NEXT STEP DESK

Meta has purchased Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup focused on teaching humanoid machines to anticipate and react to human behaviour, as per reports from several tech news outlets. The financial details of the acquisition remain private. The small firm’s entire group, including its two founders, will move into Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, the division responsible for advanced artificial intelligence research, states a report by TechCrunch on the matter.

Both founders bring substantial robotics experience. Xiaolong Wang spent time on chip design at Nvidia and later taught at the University of California, San Diego. Lerrel Pinto held a faculty position at New York University and previously helped launch Fauna Robotics, a startup making child-sized humanoids that Amazon absorbed last month. Meta signalled that the acquisition would strengthen its ability to design models for full-body robot control and self-supervised learning.