Hugo Barra's return to Meta 5 years after exit underscores Zuckerberg's AI urgency

During Hugo Barra's first stint at Meta — still known at the time as Facebook — he was a top executive in the virtual reality business. In the nearly five years he's been gone, Meta's obsession has moved away from VR and toward the latest industry craze: artificial intelligence.
Meta brought back Barra this week as part of its recent effort to bulk up in AI and to avoid getting left behind by rivals like Google and OpenAI. Barra is returning along with his colleagues at Dreamer, which he co-founded in 2024. Leaders include CEO David Singleton, previously Stripe's tech chief, and co-founder Nicholas Jitkoff, formerly senior design director at Figma.
Barra will be working in Meta's Superintelligence Labs, led by former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang, who joined the company last year as part of a $14.3 billion investment in Scale after the disappointing release of Meta's Llama 4 family of AI models.
While Meta is planning for up to $135 billion this year in capital expenditures, mostly tied to AI infrastructure, the company has yet to land on a strategy to compete with the creators of the leading AI models, namely OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Dreamer has been targeting the red-hot area of AI agents, and a month ago debuted the beta version of its core product, which Barra described as a "new operating system for AI agents and agentic apps."
"We knew this would require completely rethinking today's computing platforms," Barra, who previously spent more than five years at Google, wrote in a LinkedIn post in February. "So we took a few pages from our past work on things," he wrote, citing mobile operating systems Symbian and Android, as well as ChromeOS and the software behind Oculus VR headsets, now branded as Quest.
The latest platform shift involves AI agents, and in recent months developers have flocked to a new viral tool called OpenClaw, where they can manage AI agents across messaging apps and home computers.
Meta has been pushing aggressively into AI agent-related technology. The company spent $2 billion in late December on Singapore-based Manus, which was founded in China and specializes in helping businesses create AI agents.
In March, Meta acquired AI agent-focused social media platform Moltbook and its team. A spokesperson said at the time that, "Their approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory is a novel step in a rapidly developing space."
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 those AI assistants.
Parallel paths
Like with Scale AI, Meta isn't purchasing Dreamer outright. In this case, Meta hired Dreamer staffers as part of a licensing arrangement for the company's AI technology.
Meta declined to comment on the terms of the deal.
While Meta is investing in AI at a historic clip, the company's VR efforts are taking a backseat.
In January, the company laid off 10% of workers in its Reality Labs unit, with most of the cuts impacting VR-related initiatives like Quest headsets and the Second Life-like Horizon Worlds app. 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 away from VR. He was at the center of the company's early investments in the space.
Barra initially joined Meta in 2017 to lead its VR development a few years after the company bought Oculus for $2 billion. Barra previously spent several years at Chinese consumer electronics giant Xiaomi after his time at Google, where he was vice president of Android product management.
When Barra first joined Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that the two share a "belief that virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform."
Now, Barra will be working with Wang to accelerate Meta's progress in AI. In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Singleton, one of Dreamer's co-founders, said Wang "was helpful to us from the beginning," and that when Dreamer showed its technology to Zuckerberg earlier this year, "it was clear right away that we share the same vision of the future."
That future, he wrote, is "one where billions of people have the power to create software that makes their lives better."
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