Hugging Face’s co-founder on bringing open-source AI to life with cute robots

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hugging Face’s new AI robot, the Reachy Mini, has already racked up $1 million in sales just five days after launch. But the company isn’t trying to build a chore-doing humanoid just yet. Instead, Hugging Face sees the Reachy Mini as a hackable, desk-friendly device that's part entertainment, part entry point for developers and consumers to experiment with AI in physical form. On this episode of Equity, co-founder Thomas Wolf joins to explain why open-source AI needs hardware, how Hugging Face is thinking about robotics long term, and what might happen if people actually start coding apps for their robots. We'll also get into: How Hugging Face plans to leap from software to hardware. Hugging Face's ambitions to one day sell a full-sized humanoid robot. The role of privacy in consumer robotics, and how open-source can address it. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:49.9	Join them at brex.com, backslash, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Max Zeph, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore
0:55.1	a trend in the tech world and dive deep. For years, AI has lived in apps and in the cloud,
1:00.9	but now companies are betting people want more tangible AI you can actually hold, program, and
1:06.2	make your own. One of the more surprising players in that shift, Hugging Face, a company best known for open source AI models and developer tools.
1:13.6	Last week, they opened orders for Ritchie Mini, a tiny DIY desktop robot.
1:18.6	But this isn't just about one product. It's part of a bigger bet they're making on open robotics and tangible AI.
1:25.6	It's really fascinating. To dig into that, we're talking to Thomas
1:28.5	Wolf, co-founder and chief scientists at Hugging Face. Thomas, welcome to the show.
1:33.1	Thanks, Max. Big pleasure to talk about Ritchie. I think it's a good day to talk about that
1:38.1	because we just passed $1 million of orders, which is quite definitely unexpected when we
1:44.1	launched it five days ago.
1:45.7	So we're extremely happy about how the lounge went.
1:48.8	Yeah, five days, a million dollars in sales.
1:51.1	That's pretty good.
1:51.9	It's very impressive.
	...

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