Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence models and software, announced today that it has acquired Pollen Robotics, the French startup behind the bug-eyed, two-armed, humanoid robot called Reachy 2. Hugging Face plans to sell the robot and will also allow developers to download, modify, and suggest improvements to its code.
That’s increasingly untrue as we build tools to inspect and modify those weights. Nearly every open model has homegrown LoRA support, and most of them have abliteration code that lets you erase undesirable behaviors.
And if we’re really talking about “open-source” and not just “open-weight”, the additional scientific papers, datasets and tooling are going to help democratize the technology and even out the playing field to a degree.