What Does Meta's Hardware Team Mean for AI Development?
Meta is quietly assembling a hardware team within its Meta Superintelligence Labs division, signaling ambitions to develop AI-powered devices beyond the smart glasses and VR headsets already produced by its Reality Labs unit, according to a Business Insider report published Friday.
The company is hiring Rui Xu, who led hardware at AI agent startup Dreamer, to head the new hardware effort at MSL, according to sources familiar with the matter. Dreamer's founding team — including co-founders Hugo Barra, a former Meta executive, and former Stripe CTO David Singleton — was acqui-hired by Meta last month to work on AI agents under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, as first reported by Bloomberg.
A 'Constellation' of Devices
The hardware push aligns with Wang's broader vision for Meta's AI future. In a February appearance at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, the MSL chief said Meta wants to move beyond phones into a world where every user 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.
Some Reality Labs engineers have already transitioned to MSL to prototype the AI division's software on existing Reality Labs hardware, with the two divisions working closely together, a source told Business Insider.
Hardware Ambitions in Context
Prior to Dreamer, Xu served as chief operating officer of K-Scale, a robotics startup that shut down last year. He also led a smart devices lab at ByteDance that shipped nearly a million units in China, and has management experience at Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Tencent, according to his LinkedIn.
The move comes as Meta reshapes its hardware strategy. The company cut over 1,000 Reality Labs jobs in January, targeting VR and metaverse teams while largely sparing its augmented reality and wearables groups. Meta has since restructured roughly 1,000 remaining Reality Labs employees into AI-focused "pods", and opened its first Manhattan flagship retail location, Meta Lab New York, to showcase AI-powered hardware.
Tech rivals including OpenAI are also racing to build AI-native personal devices that go beyond the smartphone. Wang has promised "incredible velocity" from MSL in the coming months.
