Building the "App Store" for Robots: Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf on Physical AI

Robotics Industry Trends and Opportunities - Robotics is at the same inflection point that transformers and language models were a few years ago, indicating a significant growth opportunity [3] - There's a potential future transition where many software developers become roboticists if given the right tools [6] - The entertainment, fun, and education sectors present accessible entry points for robotics, with less emphasis on reliability compared to enterprise applications [17] - Many startups are building on top of robots, automating manual tasks and physical world interactions, indicating a growing ecosystem [20] Hugging Face's Strategy and Role - Hugging Face aims to reproduce the success of the Transformers library in the robotics field with the "robot" project, providing a central library for algorithms, datasets, and hardware interfaces [6] - Hugging Face's role is to build communities and promote open-source AI, allowing users to tweak, train, and control models, with a focus on local model hosting for safety in robotics applications [7][8][9] - Hugging Face acquired a hardware company, Poland Robotics, and opened orders for its first robots, signaling a move into hardware [6] - Hugging Face is focused on enabling the community by working with various actors to ensure efficient integration and collaboration within the ecosystem [53] Data and Model Development - A major challenge in robotics is the lack of sufficient data, limiting the diversity and generalizability of trained robots [22][24] - Hugging Face aims to incentivize data sharing to build a diverse, multi-location dataset for robotics training [25] - World models, aided by advancements in open-source video and image generation, are being used to generate more data for robots [28][29] Open Source and Community - Hugging Face has a robotics community of several thousand people, with exponential growth in community members and datasets [10][11] - Open source is seen as a winning solution in the long term for many applications, especially as the market matures and cost and ownership become more important [51] - The company is pushing for open science, aiming to make AI training recipes accessible to everyone, similar to how physics is learned [71][72]