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Meta has hired a veteran engineer under its newly built AI hardware division. It signals the company’s intent to develop next-generation AI devices beyond its existing smart glasses and VR offerings. The new effort is part of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) under the leadership of former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta is assembling a new hardware team and is hiring a veteran engineer to lead the effort, according to a report by Business Insider. The Facebook-parent has already made a name for itself with smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. These products are manufactured in its Reality Labs division. The new report suggests that there will be a new hardware team under MSL. It indicates that the company is exploring new categories of AI devices.
The effort has not been announced yet, but some Reality Labs employees have transitioned to MSL to prototype the new division's software. The two divisions are said to be currently working closely together on the initiative.
Meta is reportedly hiring Rui Xu to lead the hardware division at MSL. Xu previously headed hardware at Dreamer, an AI agent startup that Meta acqui-hired in March.
Xu also served as the chief operating officer of the robotics startup K-Scale and worked on smart devices at ByteDance. He has also worked in management roles at Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Tencent.
The report notes that Nat Friedman, who leads the products and applied research division at MSL, had previously invested in K-Scale through his AI Grant program.
MSL chief Wang, in a podcast with YouTuber Varun Mayya earlier this year, hinted at the possibility of Meta developing a unique AI-powered device.
“I think you're going to want your personal agent to be on a constellation of peripherals in the future, and you're going to… we're going to expand beyond the phone into a world where you're going to want your personal agent to be with you in a bunch of different ways,” Wang said on the podcast.
“That will always be on, be, you know, see what you see, hear what you hear, and will be able to just help you in a way that's much deeper than even the devices today are able to help,” he added.
Alexandr Wang was appointed after Meta acquired his startup Scale AI for $14.5 billion.
The news of Meta's AI division working on hardware devices comes at a time when companies like OpenAI are already rushing to build their own AI-native devices. The ChatGPT maker had acquired former Apple designer Jony Ive's hardware startup IO. The company is reportedly working with the veteran to bring ChatGPT-powered devices as soon as next year.
Apple is also reported to be working on its own AI-powered personal device, which could be coming as early as next year. The device is said to be an AI Pin, which could roughly be the size of an AirTag with a thin, flat, circular disc shape and feature two cameras, three microphones to pick up sound, and a speaker to play audio.
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Previous reports indicated that Meta was building an AI team dedicated to using AI to enhance its recommendation algorithms for Instagram and Facebook. In the past, Mark Zuckerberg has acquired the likes of Moltbook and Manus AI, two AI startups focused on agentic AI.
The tech giant is also pushing employees to use more AI tools at work. Zuckerberg himself is believed to have his own AI CEO agent that helps him do his work.
The rapid growth in AI is also followed by frequent layoffs by tech giants. Meta is expected to lay off 15,000 employees in a bid to manage costs. Other tech firms, such as Oracle and Amazon, have already laid off thousands of workers.
