Meta is tapping top talent into robotics efforts, including the leader behind its smart glasses

• Li-Chen Miller, who led Meta’s smart glasses, became the first product manager of its robotics team.
• The robotics group aims to develop products like humanoid robots for use in homes.
• Meta’s robotics push aligns with its AI ambitions and recent high-profile engineering hires.

Meta is ramping up its fledgling robotics effort by hiring AI talent and moving one of its most influential hardware leaders to that team.

Li-Chen Miller, who led Meta’s smart glasses portfolio, including its prototype Orion augmented reality glasses, has become the first product manager of Reality Labs’ new Robotics group, according to an internal post seen by Business Insider and later posted on LinkedIn.

“Wrapping up our 2025 launches, it feels weird to leave Wearables,” Miller wrote in her post, “but I’m truly pumped to go be the first PM on RL’s Robotics team – bring it on, RoboCats of the future.”

Miller’s move is another sign that Meta is getting serious about robotics. Earlier this year, the company established a dedicated group within Reality Labs led by former Cruise CEO Marc Whitten to develop humanoid robots capable of assisting with physical household tasks, Bloomberg reported.

As of this week, Meta had about 40 robotics-related job openings on its careers website. Some of those positions include a director of robotics product operations to lead a team to deliver “world-class robotics products,” an AI research scientist to “invent data-driven paradigms for robotics,” and multiple software engineers in robotics.

Miller announced her move in a note to colleagues titled “Ciao Wearables, Hello Robotics!” on September 19, just two days after Meta Connect, the company’s annual developer keynote, where the company unveiled its first pair of $799 smart glasses with a built-in display, and updated versions of its existing Ray-Bans.

Miller is a well-known figure inside Meta’s hardware ranks and has been central to the company’s smart glasses strategy. Before joining Meta, she worked at Microsoft on multiple products, including Xbox. Miller landed her role at Meta after sending Alex Himel, then Meta’s head of wearables, a cold email with a detailed list of improvements for Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, Bloomberg reported.

Besides Miller, Meta’s robotics team has previously brought in several high-profile engineers, including MIT roboticist Sangbae Kim, whom Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth described to The Verge as “the greatest tactical roboticist in the game right now”, as well as Jinsong Yu, the software architect for Orion. Ning Li, a 15-year veteran at Meta, leads the robotics engineering team, a role she took starting in February.

Meta’s robotics effort is tied to the company’s broader AI ambitions. The new organization is part of Reality Labs, the division behind Meta’s augmented and virtual reality hardware that continues to burn money.

The company is developing its own humanoid robot known internally as “Metabot,” The Verge reported. Bosworth told The Verge that the company’s new Superintelligence Lab, headed by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, is working with the robotics team to develop a “world model” capable of powering dextrous movement.

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

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