On July 15, In Berlin we got together at AI Plumbers Conference second edition — an open source meetup for low-level AI builders to dive deep into the plumbing of modern AI, from cutting-edge data infrastructure to AI accelerators.
With the next edition coming on 25th of October 2025 (and this time in SF, USA!) let’s hear the advise and insights from the last edition on how to assist the open source community especially in emerging sectors.
It was great to pick VB’s brain on where to find the contributors, what is a role of companies like Hugging Face in seeding the communities and making different use cases more accessible - a great example is the #LeRobot arm and hackathons around it. I’ve seen more and more of these arms in Makerspaces and at different events but what is even cooler - I’ve seen a few startups picking up the SmolVLA model that was developed for this almost toy robot and finetuning it to real life use cases like excavators and warehouse robots.
Of course, we have ported the SmolVLA model to our HW to make the inference locally and we’ll be demoing it at the upcoming AIPlumbers event!
Key moments from the talk:
0:00 – 1:15 | Introduction & Speaker Presentation
1:16 – 3:08 | Work at Hugging Face & the Role of Open Source
3:09 – 5:10 | Engaging with the Community
5:11 – 6:37 | Favorite Use Cases of AI
6:38 – 8:22 | Local Models vs. Saa
8:23 – 11:10 | Robotics & Hugging Face
11:20 – 12:53 | Future & Potential of AI
