Hugging Face Unveils Open-Source Humanoid Robots

Meta’s AI ambitions now extend across scale and strategy, with its assistant quietly crossing 1 billion monthly users across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. This milestone follows the launch of a standalone AI app and a roadmap that leans into voice, personalized help, and entertainment. While the service stays free, Mark Zuckerberg has flagged possible monetization through compute-heavy subscriptions or premium recommendations, noting user behavior will guide the approach.

On the research front, Meta’s FAIR team and The Hebrew University overturned a core assumption about large language models: longer reasoning chains don’t mean higher answers. Their study showed shorter chains improve accuracy by as much as 34.5%, slash compute by 40%, and cut inference time by a 3rd. The “short-m@k” method runs parallel short reasoning paths and uses majority voting to select the perfect result, outperforming traditional chain-of-thought techniques. Training on short sequences boosts performance, while fine-tuning on longer ones adds delay without payoff.

Beyond the buyer and research layers, Meta is extending its AI capabilities into defense through a partnership with Anduril, the military-tech firm founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey. The 2 firms are combining Meta’s AR infrastructure with Anduril’s autonomous battlefield systems, designed to boost situational awareness without increasing cognitive overload. Which means less fog of war, more real-time clarity. Palmer Luckey, founding father of Anduril and Oculus, claims the collaboration could reduce each casualties and defense costs.

Unlike legacy contractors, Anduril develops and funds its own platforms, touting speed and suppleness over red tape. It’s an approach that sets it aside from incumbents like Lockheed and Boeing. Read more.

DeepSeek’s latest upgrade, R1-0528, puts its open-source reasoning AI firmly within the ring with OpenAI’s o3 and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro. This update ramps accuracy on tough tests like AIME 2025 from 70% to 87.5%, and coding chops on LiveCodeBench jumped nearly 10%. Behind the scenes, smarter algorithms and beefed-up compute let it chew through longer token sequences, as much as 23,000 tokens per query. The model now speaks JSON, handles function calls, and drops the awkward “pondering mode” token, making developers’ lives a bit easier.

For those running on leaner hardware, a distilled 8-billion-parameter variant plays nice with GPUs around 16GB VRAM. The open MIT License stays intact, and API pricing is refreshingly transparent, starting at $0.14 per million input tokens during busy hours. Early buzz praises its coding smarts and edges it closer to the big-name competitors, proving open source can pack a punch. Read more.

Hugging Face is stepping beyond AI models and into the hardware aisle with two latest open-source humanoid robots—HopeJR and Reachy Mini. HopeJR is a full-body unit with 66 degrees of freedom and the power to walk, gesture, and grasp, all for under $3,000. Reachy Mini, alternatively, is a desktop companion designed to check voice-based and interactive AI apps, priced around $250–$300.