Meta's superintelligence division is building a dedicated hardware team — and hiring a veteran engineer to lead it — as the company pushes deeper into AI-powered devices.
Meta is already known for the smart glasses and virtual reality headsets made by its Reality Labs division. This newer effort is part of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the high-profile AI division announced last year, which hints that Meta is mulling other types of AI devices.
The effort, which has not yet been reported, has seen some Reality Labs engineers transition to MSL to prototype the AI division's software on Reality Labs hardware, with the two divisions working closely together, a source familiar with the matter said.
The tech giant is hiring Rui Xu, who headed hardware at Dreamer, an AI agent startup whose founding team Meta acqui-hired last month, to lead hardware at MSL, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Prior to Dreamer, Xu served as the chief operating officer of K-Scale, a robotics startup that shut down last year, The Information reported. Nat Friedman, who leads the products and applied research division at MSL, had invested in K-Scale through the AI Grant program he co-founded.
Xu previously worked on smart devices at TikTok owner ByteDance, leading a lab that shipped millions of units in China, according to his LinkedIn. He also has management experience at smartphone maker Xiaomi, laptop manufacturer Lenovo, and internet giant Tencent.
Meta declined to comment. Xu did not respond to an email requesting comment.
Tech giants like OpenAI are racing to build an AI-native personal device that isn't just a smartphone.
In a February podcast appearance, MSL chief Alexandr Wang said that Meta wants to expand beyond phones into a world where everyone has a personalized AI agent that lives across a "constellation" of devices.
"You're going to want your personal agent to be with you in a bunch of different ways that will always be on, see what you see, hear what you hear," Wang said on the podcast.
"Over the coming months, you're going to see incredible velocity coming from us," he added.
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