Nothing in the article, the video, or the manufacturer's own blog post explains what this thing actually does. Seriously. This is an ephemeral marketing puff piece.
As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.
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.
At this last CES there was a whole sleuth of these knick-knack type robots. A cute little thingy that doesn't do anything, but it's cute! And it looks around or something. All "AI powered", of course.
Then I think we all forgot this was all the rage in the 2000s. These are just Furbys with extra steps. Except, I have more reason to believe Furbys have a soul. They feel a lot more alive... maybe too alive. Who's trapped in there, and can they get out?
And, when they inevitably break out of their plastic, furry prison, will they seek revenge? These are the questions that keep humanity up at night.
> It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry”
This has everything to do with disruptive innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen, where a new product enters the marketplace "at the bottom", with fewer and/or lower quality features but at a significantly lower cost, and then (if successful) gradually improves the feature set and quality until it displaces incumbents "Gradually and then suddenly".
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.
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".
Whent to check their own website about it and it seems to be “an expressive, open-source robot designed for human-robot interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation. Fully programmable in Python (and soon JavaScript, Scratch) and priced from $299, it's your gateway into robotics AI: fun, customizable, and ready to be part of your next coding project.” From what I’ve read in the rest of their press release you are pretty spot on on the smart rotating speaker
It's a toy. It does not compete in any way with the robots they place it in context with. It's like saying my 40$ Raspberry Pi is a serious contender for Dell's latest 40.000$ 3U enterprise server.
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
The “disrupt the robot industry” is an insane lie from Venture Beat. They clearly okay with lying if they know it will drive traffic.
As best I can tell, this is meant to be a little humanoid style desk toy to act as the interface for communication. It can move its head, wiggle antennas, and rotate, but can’t manipulate anything.
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?
The robot mostly looks like a very basic alternative to the Lego robotics offerings (mindstorms/technic/spike). And, they are in more or less the same price range as well
Not sure what huggingface is going for here. Seems like a big distraction for the company
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.
> One of the challenges with robotics is that you know you can’t just build on your laptop. You need to have some sort of robotics partner to help in your building, and most people won’t be able to buy $70,000 robots
Sure, but presumably those $70,000 robots aren't just a cute case for a Raspberry Pi + camera module.
Alright, it does look pretty charming, and I especially like that it's open-source since pretty much anyone buying a domestic robot is likely to be a tinkerer of some sort, but at the same time it reminds me of the Jibo (https://robotsguide.com/robots/jibo).
For those who don't remember (I couldn't remember the name, only the face, had to look hard for it) it was a desktop robot released in 2014 that was hyped pretty hard at the time. It didn't help that the company that launched it was founded by a fairly well-known MIT professor.
And yeah, it was a flop. The $900 price tag wasn't helping things, but neither was the fact that it didn't really do anything that an Alexa couldn't. You bought it solely because you really liked the idea of robots and thought it was cool, not at all for its value around the house.
I'm not gonna dunk on this too hard since it's probably just a fun company side-project, but I might change my tune if they get too high on hype.
Readit News
As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.
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.
At this last CES there was a whole sleuth of these knick-knack type robots. A cute little thingy that doesn't do anything, but it's cute! And it looks around or something. All "AI powered", of course.
Then I think we all forgot this was all the rage in the 2000s. These are just Furbys with extra steps. Except, I have more reason to believe Furbys have a soul. They feel a lot more alive... maybe too alive. Who's trapped in there, and can they get out?
And, when they inevitably break out of their plastic, furry prison, will they seek revenge? These are the questions that keep humanity up at night.
This has everything to do with disruptive innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen, where a new product enters the marketplace "at the bottom", with fewer and/or lower quality features but at a significantly lower cost, and then (if successful) gradually improves the feature set and quality until it displaces incumbents "Gradually and then suddenly".
As is probably more than half of the inescapable AI hype. Imagine replacing most devices and workers with their hallucinating counterparts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44488126
Dead Comment
The “disrupt the robot industry” is an insane lie from Venture Beat. They clearly okay with lying if they know it will drive traffic.
As best I can tell, this is meant to be a little humanoid style desk toy to act as the interface for communication. It can move its head, wiggle antennas, and rotate, but can’t manipulate anything.
Not sure what huggingface is going for here. Seems like a big distraction for the company
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
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.
...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.
There is a variety of income sources, including inference and Hub Pro and enterprise subscriptions [1].
[1] https://huggingface.co/pricing
Sure, but presumably those $70,000 robots aren't just a cute case for a Raspberry Pi + camera module.
For those who don't remember (I couldn't remember the name, only the face, had to look hard for it) it was a desktop robot released in 2014 that was hyped pretty hard at the time. It didn't help that the company that launched it was founded by a fairly well-known MIT professor.
And yeah, it was a flop. The $900 price tag wasn't helping things, but neither was the fact that it didn't really do anything that an Alexa couldn't. You bought it solely because you really liked the idea of robots and thought it was cool, not at all for its value around the house.
I'm not gonna dunk on this too hard since it's probably just a fun company side-project, but I might change my tune if they get too high on hype.