"Xiaomi, ByteDance 'veterans' lead team to secretly plan AI new hardware at Meta"

Meta Super Intelligent Lab is quietly forming a hardware team led by Xu Rui, a senior product person who has worked at Xiaomi and ByteDance for many years. Although Meta's Reality Labs is well known for its smart glasses and VR headsets, this latest move indicates that Meta is exploring new AI devices beyond existing forms. To advance this strategy, some Reality Labs engineers have transferred to the Super Intelligence Lab. Who is Xu Rui? Xu Rui is a post-80s who grew up in Hefei. In 1999, he entered Harbin Institute of Technology through the college entrance examination from Hefei No.1 High School. After completing his undergraduate studies, he went to Seoul National University for a master's degree. After completing his master's degree, Xu Rui joined LG Electronics and participated in the development of the world's first Linux-based mobile phone, which was five years ahead of Android phones. In 2008, Xu Rui returned to China and joined the multimedia codec chip startup company Silicon Dian Technology as a founding engineer and software lead. After the company was acquired, he joined Intel as a software application engineer, and participated in the development of the earliest Android, Google TV, Netflix mobile and TV applications. At the age of 30, Xu Rui decided to shift his career focus to product management. He entered the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to pursue a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree. During his MBA studies, he joined Amazon Lab 126 and became one of the first product managers for Fire TV, which marked the beginning of his product management career. After graduating with his MBA, he briefly worked as a product manager at AOL. In 2015, Xu Rui returned to China and successively joined major companies such as Xiaomi, Lenovo, ByteDance, and BOE, leading or being responsible for the development of products such as Xiaomi Box, Lenovo smart monitors, Smartisan Nut R2, Great Power smart learning lights, and BOE TCON chips. In 2024, Xu Rui resigned from his position as senior director of Tencent XR products, and joined the Silicon Valley startup company K-Scale Labs at Siasun Robot&Automation as Chief Operating Officer, leading hardware development at Siasun Robot&Automation. However, the company closed down after only a year due to running out of funding. Subsequently, Xu Rui joined the AI intelligence body startup company Dreamer as the hardware lead. Last month, Meta conducted a "talent acquisition" of Dreamer, and Xu Rui subsequently joined Meta. What is Meta's new AI hardware? It is not yet known what exactly Meta's new AI hardware is. But it is certain that it will not be an AI phone similar to the "Bean Phone". Xu Rui believes that the "Bean Phone" is essentially a "key spirit" with a large model mounted on it, imitating human finger operations in a clumsy yet high-speed manner. It is like a "nuclear-powered pencil sharpener": holding the "nuclear reactor" of the AI era (large model), but forcibly driving the "old machine" of the mobile 2.0 era (APP system), and finally being imprisoned in a traditional "rectangular glass box" (phone). In his blog, Xu Rui reviewed the evolution path of computing platforms: the core logic of the PC era was "mouse + menu", and the mobile era was "touch + APP". Each generation of hardware and software paradigm is highly self-consistent. In the AI era, it should have its own native logic. He points out that true AI hardware should not be "AI for the sake of AI", but rather devices that can access tools, drive projects, and solve physical world problems that old hardware cannot solve. In a recent blog post, Xu Rui proposed the concept of "Stupid Devices in the AI Era". He believe that in the AI era, the capabilities of t