Hello everyone. Hello Laura. Nice to see you all. Oh, nice. Old face on new face.
It's always a pleasure to see many familiar faces. Always a pleasure to be at Station F. For the little story, Hugging Face started at the very first batch of Station F a long time ago. Now we're 10 years old. We did three years in this building with three different incubators.
Great. So, I'm Laura. I lead founder experience at OpenAI or as I often say, I work with people who are building the future. But today, we're here to talk about physical AI, which is what we're both excited about. Yeah, we're both extremely excited about. I feel like I spent the day talking to people about how people are using codecs and robotics, but there's never been anyone I've met who has a better horizontal view of what's happening in robotics and in physical AI than you. We can talk about Richi Mini. We can talk about Lohobu or we can talk about everything that you're seeing. What are you most excited about in robotics right now?
In robotics, oh my god, so many things. I would say specifically for here I'm very excited about the state of robotics in Europe because I think Europe has a huge set of early or later stage companies. Some of them I've seen for a long time. They're very promising. I think Europe has this huge industrial history. We know how to build stuff. I think robotics is interesting because it's not yet a game of I need the largest data center and that's ultimately the only thing that matters. It's a game of I can be smart how I build my robots. I can be smart how I train it. You cannot yet put three trillion parameters in a robot. You're constrained by latency and that's also something that's very nice for us. So we can train small models. You can use open source. So I think it's a good area where I think Europe can build massive companies.
Great. Okay. So as I said, you spend a lot of time here. You talk to — I've never met anyone in physical AI who doesn't know you or doesn't already work a little bit with Hugging Face. But not only do you spend a lot of time in Europe, you go to the US every month and every quarter or every few months you also go to Shenzhen. How would you compare what you're seeing in the different markets?
It's interesting. I think people approach that very differently. One angle to see that is in Shenzhen or in China, people approach it with a very hardware focus. So typically a robotics team in China will be like a team that used to build EVs and they start with a very strong manufacturing angle in mind. They're like, 'Okay, how are we going to mass produce this?' You get robots like Unitree, very impressive. If you go visit the manufacturing line of Unitree, they test every single piece for reliability. Every single piece of the robot is tested over there. They really go quickly there, but then they maybe spend a little less effort or interest in the brain of the robot. So you will have this very impressive hardware platform, but they don't really spend a lot of time on the brain. I think the US is almost the opposite. You go to companies like Nvidia, they're fabless. They don't really build any robots, but they spend a lot of time on the algorithm, on the brain. And Europe is somewhere in the middle. If you go to ETH, if you visit Zurich, you see these teams, they know really well how to build robots, but they're also very ML native. There are people who know how to train LLMs or VLMs or world models. So I think Europe has both talents, and it's interesting that if you go to the US, you can categorize all the robotics companies if they are more hardware or software, and you see very few companies that have both capabilities in-house at a high level. Maybe Tesla is one, and honestly there is very little. I think that's what's missing a lot in the US, and in Europe I do see that.
Speaking of ETH robotics, they have those robotics called there that I get super excited about because I feel like Europe has come together in a way that I've not seen in the US or China or anywhere else to truly build community. The robotics community and the collaboration that we're seeing in Europe right now is quite unique. The robotics club in Zurich was self-organized by students and they have a project that is run across the club where there's a team that's working on each part of the robot. There's a part looking at joints, there's a part looking at the head, there's a part looking at the movement, there's a part looking at the software, and they all come together to collaborate. There's a lot of learning that happens. Then they worked with a lot of the other universities around Europe and created the European Student Robotics Association. It's 14 of the top technical universities in Europe with over 2,500 students across the geography that are collaborating, hosting hackathons together. So I'm very bullish on where robotics is going to go in Europe from the younger talent that we see coming out of. Let me ask you a couple of questions as well. I heard you recently became head of global founder experience at OpenAI. Can you tell us a little bit what is it for a robotics startup to work with OpenAI? Where can you help? How does it work? What's the founder experience when they work with you?
Well, first of all, I start with I'm extremely fortunate because I have the best job in the world. I wish all of you could have the joy that I have. I get to work with founders and investors and developers every day. For two years, I got to do that with the best of the builders who are right here in Europe. I'm extremely happy that the team that we built is now working really well. Whoever you are, wherever you are, if you're in Europe, you will get to work with the best startups team in the world. Trisha Troth joined and is now running this team, and every single person is the best person I've ever worked with. So now that we have this fantastic team in startups, I got to move on to say, okay, as a platform we do extremely well in our developer experience, telling all of you how to get the most value out of the models. How do you build and how do you get to have all the benchmarks? On the technical side, what is it that you want to build? On the other hand, once you start commercializing and building for others, how do you get the most value out of the platform OpenAI as a partner? As a founder, you have a partner for success. We're not just transacting and selling to you, but from day one, the moment you decide to build a company and you decide that you're in service of that use case and the users, we can partner with you so that we're there from day one all the way to exit. We can really see what it is that is a step change in strategically using us for growth and for value beyond the models.
So everything and anything that isn't sales. And as a reminder, OpenAI was extremely big on robotics. I remember the hand on the Rubik's cube. Maybe some of the people were around in AI in 2019. I see some happy people right here.
2019. Yeah, the hand on the Rubik's cube. I'm very excited. I mean, I want to ask you because I guess this is all under NDA, but about the new hardware coming.
Well, I'll tell you what. We are a research and deployment company. We've always done research on intelligence, and the very frontier of intelligence is what we want to continue to always do research on. What is in research is very broad and vast. Obviously robotics goes in there. Then there's product and then there's deploying it. I work on the deployment side of things. So I don't know what and when will come out of research, but obviously we're doing a lot in making sure that we're at the forefront of robotics research. If and when something else comes up, we'll be very happy to share.
I know some of the Richi Mini came to OpenAI. So I don't know if it's for personal use or for research. I hope it's for research. I've seen a lot of demos with it. Why don't you tell us? Okay, so Richi Mini sits on the desk. My daughter uses it. All my colleagues now use it. I walked in the office in Paris yesterday and I saw a few on our desks. There's Lohobu. We're seeing a lot of humanoids here.
