NederlandsMeta built a humanoid household robot with a Chinese company
According to The Information, Meta and China's Fourier built a humanoid robot, codenamed Max, in about three months. It is meant to help around the house. Meta calls it research: selling it is not planned.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has built a prototype of a humanoid robot together with the Chinese robotics company Fourier: a robot with a human shape, with arms, legs and a head. This is reported by the US tech site The Information, based on people familiar with the matter. Internally, the robot has the codename Max, and it is meant to help people with ordinary chores around the house.
A Meta spokesperson told The Information that the cooperation with Fourier is about research and experiments. Meta does not plan to sell the robots or offer them in any other way.
What Max looks like
According to the reports, the two companies built the first prototype in about three months, in Shanghai. This year, Meta employees worked there with Fourier for about two months. At the end of August, the robot was shown to part of the staff at an internal meeting.
Max is about 1.5 metres tall and weighs about 48 kilograms. The head has a screen that shows facial expressions, and there are speakers in the chest. The hands have five fingers and are made to pick up small things, such as bottles and toys. As its "brain", the robot uses Jetson Thor, a computer from Nvidia made especially for robots.
What the robot is meant to do
Meta mainly wants Max to deal well with people. According to The Information, the robot should understand spoken commands from about five metres away, recognise gestures such as waving from about three metres, and look people in the eye. It should also show what it is doing: listening, thinking, talking, or being unsure about a task. These are goals for the development. How well Max already reaches them is not known.
Since September, the companies have been working on a second version, Max 2. It gets a new upper body, better hands, a projector and extra sensors, among other things to make climbing stairs possible. According to The Information, Meta is also looking for robot engineers in Shanghai and Shenzhen, to build prototypes and for possible large-scale production.
Part of a bigger plan
Meta has been working on robots for some time. In the spring, the company bought the US start-up Assured Robot Intelligence, which makes AI software that lets humanoid robots understand human behaviour. The team now works at Meta Superintelligence Labs. According to The Information, chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth has talked internally about a humanoid robot as a possible body for Muse, Meta's personal AI assistant. In early 2025, Meta had already tested its software Partnr, for cooperation between humans and robots, on the robot dog Spot from Boston Dynamics.
What does this mean for the road to the singularity?
AI assistants today mostly exist as text on a screen. With Max, Meta is working on a next step: an assistant that can also walk around the house, understand you and fetch something for you. That a large AI company could have such a prototype built in three months shows how fast robot parts are becoming available. The next step is to show that such a robot carries out its tasks safely and reliably in a real living room. If that works, AI literally gets hands to help us in daily life.
What is the technological singularity? Read the explanation →
