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Meta just built its first humanoid robot

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Meta teamed up with Chinese robotics firm Fourier to build Max, a 5-foot, 106-pound humanoid robot designed to handle household chores. Built in just three months and powered by Nvidia’s Jetson Thor chip, the prototype gives Meta a physical testbed to train real-world AI and take on Tesla’s Optimus.

Meta just built its first humanoid robot
Image: therundown.ai

Meta is officially stepping out of the metaverse and into your living room.

According to The Information, the social media giant has built its very first humanoid robot prototype, dubbed Max. The robot stands 5 feet tall, weighs around 106 pounds, and is specifically designed to help tackle household chores.

What is wild is the speed: Meta went from concept to a working machine in just three months, teaming up with Chinese robotics manufacturer Fourier.

A 3-month sprint powered by Nvidia Thor

Max looks built for domestic life rather than heavy manufacturing. It features a head-mounted display capable of showing facial expressions, a built-in speaker, and dexterous hands fine-tuned to pick up small everyday items.

Under the hood, Meta packed in serious computing power. Max reportedly runs on Nvidia's Jetson Thor, a Blackwell-based robotics brain packing up to 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS and 128GB of memory at a 130W power draw.

This gives Meta a real-world playground to test its AI models, helping systems learn how to see, walk, and manipulate everyday objects in three dimensions instead of inside simulations.

Max 2 is already in the works

Meta is not treating this as a one-off experiment.

Reports indicate that Meta has been actively developing Max 2 since September. The upgraded version comes with a redesigned torso, improved hands, an onboard projector, and extra sensors specifically tailored to handle stairs.

This physical milestone follows Bloomberg reports from last year noting that Meta had set up an internal robotics hardware team, alongside its acquisition of a robotics AI startup earlier this year. Max is the first tangible machine to emerge from that push.

Why it matters

We think Meta's playbook here is remarkably practical.

Instead of spending years reinventing joints and actuators like Tesla is doing with Optimus, Meta outsourced the heavy hardware lifting to an established Chinese partner. Getting a functioning platform built in ninety days lets Meta bypass typical robotics bottlenecks and focus on what it does best: training brains.

Do not expect Max to fold your laundry anytime soon. Like most domestic prototypes, it is primarily a data collector, and proving it can operate safely around kids and pets is years away.

Still, it shifts the competitive dynamics. While Tesla targets factory floors, Meta is eyeing homes. If software-first tech giants can simply plug advanced spatial models into outsourced physical bodies, the race to commercialize embodied AI is about to accelerate dramatically.

Sources (2)

  1. [1]
    news.bloomberglaw.com(opens in a new tab)Originalnews.bloomberglaw.com
  2. [2]

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