Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the robotics industry

The blog explains it: It can move its head, antennas, and rotate. It’s a little humanoid desk toy to stand in for computer interaction.

It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry” like the Venture Beat headline says. It’s a little animated thing to house the AV equipment.

OMG!!! I want one in my office so that every time someone comes in it will turn to look at them with those camera eyes and creep people out. That's a very valuable use case IMO.

It's a toy. It does not compete in any way with the robots they place it in context with. It's like saying my 40$ Raspberry Pi is a serious contender for Dell's latest 40.000$ 3U enterprise server.

> This is an ephemeral marketing puff piece.

As is probably more than half of the inescapable AI hype. Imagine replacing most devices and workers with their hallucinating counterparts.

Meanwhile, I'm just noticing that the HN title filter can seriously damage meaning when it removes words like "how" or specific numbers (despite the obvious reasons for doing so), but apparently doesn't care about phrases like "disrupt the ... industry".

you saw the video - it bobs its head and records all your activities and audio to send back to HQ.

i thought it was kinda obvious, given the raspberry pi and programmable interface: it doesn't _do_ anything on its own, but its a programmable robot that you can tell what to do. i'm speculating that there'll be a marketplace of user-submitted and official HuggingFace "apps" to load onto it

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What you say is true. It's also a physical vehicle for speech models from Huggingface, which might be fun. However I don't understand where the computation for that will take place.

So, my brain defaulted to "people are smart, so it makes sense", so it understood it as "it's the toy you keep within reach". But if you look at Pollen Robotics product, you see they have a "Reachy", which can indeed move, and has arms to interact with its environment. So yeah, it's a weird name. It reaches your heart through the feeling it communicates to you with its antennas?

Presumably it's a reference to the disruption claims in the marketing--a giant reach.

"Hugging face" is also a pretty weird name

It's an easy bet that people will outfit the thing with arms, legs, wheels, tentacles - you name it. Assuming it can be modded, it will be modded.

I don’t see the comparison to Mindstorms

This is more like a Furby that you’re supposed to connect to your AI system’s audio/video interface so people can interact with a stationary humanoid device

Hardly. This seems like the opposite alternative, something that has minimal or no mechanical hardware provisions, and few ways to interface with external motors and sensors.

I am not sure what HF is going for here either, because it doesn't actually do anything; yet?

I mean, great: I have another $300 toy in the makerspace arena that I can program. Awesome; I write code and am heavily invested personally and professionally with LLMs (open-weight models running on local GPUs as well as LLM chatbots that everyone knows, like Gemini, OpenAI, and Claude). Now what? It'll sit on my desk and maybe gather dust, if it's not dancing, because...it doesn't actually have a point or built in capabilities out of the gate--at least not that I can see--aside from looking cute and dancing according to the video in the press-release-article; all things that any $30 toy on Amazon can already do.

I love huggingface and they've done a lot for the industry

...But...

I'm so confused by the economics, and not in a general way.

I'm a mobile developer by trade, and AFAICT from dipping my toe in the water of servers, file downloads are on the order of $0.01/GB, and cheapest you'll get publicly is maybe $0.04/GB. But they never ever charge and regularly have people downloading tens of gigabytes.

That's the cost side as far as I understand it.

On the revenue side...afaict all they have is inference? And they don't seem to be popular for an inference solution? I don't hear much about it and they don't seem to care too much.

How do their economics even begin to pencil out? It bothers me, I've lived through enough companies to know this doesn't matter in the short term. But this is novel, to me, in that there's no plan, no market being addressed. With other money losers, you knew what they were trying to do and they were doing it.

The only disruption here is the hyperbole.

Raspberry pi with microphone and camera.

I think they are all lucky it doesn't say "android and ios only" like many gadgets these days. Desktops are dying, I feel old...

are you suggesting that Windows doesn't have the majority of the install base?

This is definitely an artifact of the developers writing code for themselves first.

Windows would probably work through WSL, right?

Looking at the BOM (6 cheapest servos, one usb camera, a usb hub, a microctronller ,two mics, 30cm-high low-precision plastic) the price looks fairly realistic to me. I could imagine it at half the price on aliexpress. The manufacturing or sourcing doesn't seem complicated. So overall it looks like a very realistic endeavor.

The only negative point I see: Pollen Robotics doesn't seem used to do mass market/cheap products. But as I said, it seems to be a pretty simple production (I mean, they are probably running everywhere like crazy because nothing is ready and everything is broken, but they should be able to accomplish this)