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

In this interview, Thomas Wolf, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, discusses the company's venture into robotics with the LeRobot project. He draws parallels between the current state of robotics and the earlier days of transformers and language models, emphasizing the potential for a large open-source community in robotics. Wolf details LeRobot's components—policy models, datasets, and hardware—and Hugging Face's role in fostering community, open-source AI, and safety in robotics. He also touches on the challenges and opportunities in robotics, including data scarcity, the role of world models, the debate around humanoid robots, and the balance between open and closed models, as well as the rise of open-source contributions from China. Furthermore, Wolf shares his views on open science, AI's role in scientific discovery, and Hugging Face's long-term vision of empowering everyone to build with AI.