Hugo Barr, former Facebook VP of VR, returns to Meta
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During Hugo Barra’s first stint Meta He was a top executive in the virtual reality business, then still known as Facebook. In the nearly five years since he left, Mehta’s obsession has shifted away from VR and toward the industry’s latest fad: artificial intelligence.
Meta brought Barra back this week as part of its recent efforts to strengthen its AI and keep up with rivals such as: google And OpenAI. Barra will return with colleagues from Dreamer, which he co-founded in 2024. Leaders include CEO David Singleton, previously head of technology at Stripe, and co-founder Nicholas Zitkoff, a former senior design director. figma.
Barra will work in Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, led by former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang, who joined Scale last year as part of a $14.3 billion investment in the company after the disappointing release of Meta’s Llama 4 family of AI models.
Meta plans up to $135 billion in capital spending this year, much of it related to AI infrastructure, but the company has yet to establish a strategy to compete with major AI model creators such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Dreamer is targeting the hottest field of AI agents and debuted a beta version of its core product a month ago. Barra described it as “a new operating system for AI agents and agent apps.”
“We knew this required a complete rethinking of today’s computing platforms,” Barra, who previously spent more than five years at Google, said in a February post on LinkedIn. “We’ve taken a few pages from what we’ve done so far,” he wrote, citing mobile operating systems Symbian and Android as well as ChromeOS and the software behind the Oculus VR headset, now branded as Quest.
The latest platform transition involves AI agents, and in recent months, developers have flocked to a new viral tool called OpenClaw that lets them manage AI agents across messaging apps and home computers.
Meta is actively working on AI agent related technologies. In late December, the company invested $2 billion in Manus, a Chinese-founded Singapore-based company that specializes in helping companies create AI agents.
In March, Meta acquired Moltbook, a social media platform specializing in AI agents, and its team. “The company’s approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory is another step in a rapidly evolving field,” a spokesperson said at the time.
Dreamer, Moltbook, and Manus each address different use cases for AI agents. Dreamer targets consumers, Manus focuses on businesses, and Moltbook acts as a digital directory for all these AI assistants.
parallel path
Similar to Scale AI, Meta is not acquiring Dreamer outright. In this case, Meta hired Dreamer’s staff as part of a licensing agreement for its AI technology.
Mehta declined to comment on the terms of the deal.
While Meta is investing in AI at historic levels, the company’s VR efforts have been on the back burner.
The company laid off 10% of its Reality Labs division employees in January, mostly affecting VR-related efforts like Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds apps like Second Life. Within Reality Labs, Meta is shifting its focus from VR to AI glasses and related wearable devices.
It’s fitting that Barra rejoins Meta during its transition from VR. He was a key figure in the company’s early investments in this area.
Barra first joined Meta in 2017, a few years after the company acquired Oculus for $2 billion, to lead VR development. Barra was vice president of Android product management at Google and spent several years at Chinese consumer electronics giant Xiaomi.
When Barra first joined Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that the two shared “a belief that virtual reality and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform.”
Barra will now work with Wang to accelerate Meta’s progress in the AI field. In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Mr. Singleton, one of Dreamer’s co-founders, said that Mr. Wang “helped us from the beginning” and that when Dreamer presented its technology to Mr. Zuckerberg earlier this year, “it was immediately clear that we shared the same vision for the future.”
That future, he wrote, “is one in which billions of people have the power to create software that improves their lives.”
Attention: You’d be surprised to find that Meta’s layoffs are as large as reported.
