TL;DR
The robot butler has a new suitor with very deep pockets. Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has reportedly built a five-foot humanoid robot called Max with a Chinese robot maker, and has already started on a second version. As reported, Meta sees robots like this as a physical body for its AI assistant, with household chores as the long-term goal. Meta calls it internal research, and the story rests on a single secondhand report. It points to a shift that matters for anyone hoping a machine will one day fold the laundry: the biggest AI companies are starting to want bodies for their software, and they have found they can buy those bodies quickly, rather than spend years building them. That is how a sci-fi idea starts getting funded at the scale it needs. For the odds on a robot that does household chores and a timeline of the breakthroughs that lead there, subscribe.
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