AIBRIEF
Vikas Chandra, who led AI for Meta's smart glasses for eight years, is leaving to build AI that helps machines act in the real world at Atoms, Travis Kalanick's $1.7 billion robotics startup.
Vikas Chandra spent eight years squeezing AI into Meta's smart glasses. Travis Kalanick's robotics startup Atoms is hiring him to do the same thing for robots. The device moves, the world is messier, and the round behind him is $1.7 billion.
Chandra announced the move on Monday in an X post, joining Atoms as VP of AI. His mandate, in his own words, is to build "foundation models for the physical world," which means AI systems designed to help machines understand and act in real environments rather than parse text and images on a screen.
The bet is that the small-form-factor, on-device AI work he ran at Meta is the closest dry-run for embodied autonomy. Smart glasses have to make sense of a noisy room from a head-mounted camera with a tight power budget. Robots have to do it while moving through one.
Atoms says it is building robots for food, mining, and transportation. Andreessen Horowitz led a $1.7 billion round earlier this summer, the first major capital event after Kalanick publicly unveiled the company. Former Uber CFO Gautam Gupta joined as CFO last month, and Atoms acquired autonomous-mining startup Pronto, run by ex-Uber self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski, earlier this year. Kalanick's ghost-kitchen venture CloudKitchens now sits inside Atoms as a subsidiary.
Chandra and Atoms declined to comment beyond Chandra's post. The open question is whether the architecture that worked on a face will scale to a fleet of robots.