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

In this article META Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Hugo Barr, formerly VP of VR at Facebook, has returned to Meta Money Sharma | AFP | Getty Images 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 t...