Latest news with #open-source
BBC News
5 days ago
- General
- BBC News
BBC Verify Live: Investigating latest Gaza shooting near aid site
Update: Date: 09:03 BST Title: Tuesday on BBC Verify Live Content: Rob CorpBBC Verify Live editor Good morning. Welcome to our live page where we showcase the work of the BBC's experts in fact-checking, open-source intelligence gathering and investigating disinformation. I've just come out of the morning meeting where BBC Verify's team leaders discuss the priorities for the day and how we can enhance and inform the BBC's reporting using forensic techniques to dig into the stories behind the headlines. Here's what we're looking at today: As ever, we're always keen to hear from you throughout the day - so please do get in touch via this form.
TechCrunch
29-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Hugging Face unveils two new humanoid robots
AI dev platform Hugging Face continued its push into robotics on Thursday with the release of two new humanoid robots. The company announced a pair of open-source robots, HopeJR and Reachy Mini. HopeJR is a full-size humanoid robot that has 66 actuated degrees of freedom, or 66 independent movements, including the ability to walk and move its arms. Reachy Mini is a desktop unit that can move its head, talk, listen, and be used to test AI apps. Meet HopeJr, a full humanoid robot lowering the barrier to entry! Capable of walking, manipulating many objects, open-source and costs under $3000 🤯 Designed by @therobotstudio and @huggingface 👇 — Remi Cadene (@RemiCadene) May 29, 2025 Hugging Face doesn't have an exact timeline for shipping these robots. The company's co-founder and CEO, Clem Delangue, told TechCrunch over email that they expect to start shipping at least the first few units by the end of the year, and the waitlist is currently open. Reachy Mini Credit: Hugging Face Hugging Face estimates that the HopeJR will cost around $3,000 per unit and the Reachy Mini will cost around $250-$300, depending on tariffs. 'The important aspect is that these robots are open source, so anyone can assemble, rebuild, [and] understand how they work, and [that they're] affordable, so that robotics doesn't get dominated by just a few big players with dangerous black-box systems,' Delangue said via email. This robot release was made possible in part by the company's acquisition of humanoid robotics startup Pollen Robotics, which was announced in April, according to Delangue. He added that the Pollen team gave Hugging Face 'new capabilities' required to make these bots. Hugging Face has been making a concerted push into the robotics industry over the past few years. It launched LeRobot, a collection of open AI models, data sets, and tools to build robotics systems, in 2024. Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW So far in 2025, the company has released an updated version of its 3D-printed and programmable robotic arm, the SO-101, which the company built in a partnership with French robotics firm The Robot Studio. It also expanded the training data on its LeRobot platform, through a partnership with AI startup Yaak, to include training data for self-driving machines.
Entrepreneur
28-05-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Plane Soars Higher with Sort Acquisition
With this acquisition, Plane officially expands to the United States, marking a pivotal moment in its evolution. You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. In a bold move signaling its global ambitions, Plane—the open-source project management platform reimagining how modern teams collaborate—has acquired Sort, a US-based engineering team renowned for its AI-native enterprise systems. With this acquisition, Plane officially expands to the United States, marking a pivotal moment in its evolution. "Bringing the Sort team into Plane and expanding into the US are meaningful steps as we scale both our technology and our community," said Plane's CEO, Vamsi Kurama. "Our focus remains on building a platform that's not just open-core in principle, but also in practice—designed to give teams full ownership of their workflows, data, and future." The Sort team brings not only deep technical expertise in scalable software, but also a history of solving complex enterprise challenges with AI-driven architectures. By integrating this talent, Plane aims to accelerate its mission of delivering a customisable, secure, and transparent project management solution tailored for businesses navigating digital transformation. The move comes faster than expected—only 18 months after Plane secured USD 4 million in seed funding. Originally planned as a later-phase initiative, the expansion into California reflects mounting demand from North American enterprises for modern, self-managed project tools. Adding further momentum, Plane welcomes seasoned talent from industry leaders like PayPal, Elastic, and BitGo. Their collective experience in scaling developer-first products aligns with Plane's goal to build a unified Work OS that includes task management, wikis, timelines, and advanced security features. Already trusted by over 100,000 users, Plane is setting its sights higher. As Plane takes flight in the US, it's clear the future of project management is not just open—it's intelligent, flexible, and built for how teams truly work.
Zawya
15-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Alibaba introduces open-source model for video creation and editing
Alibaba has unveiled Wan 2.1-VACE (Video All-in-one Creation and Editing), its latest open-source model for video creation and editing. This innovative tool combines multiple video processing functions into a single model, to streamline the video creation process, boosting efficiency and productivity. As part of Alibaba's video generation large model – the Wan2.1 series – VACE is the first open-source model in the industry to provide a unified solution for various video generation and editing tasks. Wan2.1-VACE supports video generation with multi-modal inputs spanning text, image, and video while offering creators comprehensive video editing capabilities. These editing features include referencing images or frames, video repainting, modifying selected areas of the video and spatio-temporal extension, all of which enable the flexible combination of various tasks to enhance creativity. With this advanced tool, users can generate video containing specific interacting subjects based on image samples and bring static images to life by adding natural movement effects. They can also enjoy advanced video repainting functions such as pose transfer, motion control, depth control, and recolorization. The model also supports adding, modification or deletion to selective specific areas of a video without affecting the surroundings. It also allows for the extension of video boundaries while intelligently filling in content to enrich the visual experience. As an all-in-one AI model, Wan2.1-VACE delivers unparalleled versatility, enabling users to seamlessly combine multiple functions and unlock innovative potential. Users can turn a static image into video while controlling the movement of objects by specifying the motion trajectory. They can seamlessly replace characters or objects with specified references, animate referenced characters, control poses, and expand a vertical image horizontally to create a horizontal video while adding new elements through referencing. Innovative Technologies Wan2.1-VACE leverages several innovative technologies, to take into account the needs of different video editing tasks during construction and design. Its unified interface, called Video Condition Unit (VCU), supports unified processing of multimodal inputs such as text, images, video, and masks. The model employs a Context Adapter structure that injects various task concepts using formalized representations of temporal and spatial dimensions. This innovative design enables it to flexibly manage a wide range of video synthesis tasks. Thanks to advancements in model architecture, Wan2.1-VACE can be widely applied in the rapid production of social media short videos, content creation for advertising and marketing, post-production and special effects processing in film and television, and for educational training video generation. Training video foundation models requires immense computing resources and vast amounts of high-quality training data. Open access helps lower the barrier for more businesses to leverage AI, enabling them to create high-quality visual content tailored to their needs, quickly and cost-effectively. Alibaba is open-sourcing the Wan2.1-VACE model in two versions; a 14-billion(B)-parameter and a 1.3-billion(B)-parameter. The models are available to download for free on Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud's open-source community, ModelScope. As one of the earliest major global tech companies to open source its self-developed large-scale AI models, Alibaba open sourced four Wan2.1 models in February 2025 and, last month, a video generation model that supports video creation with start and end frames. To date, the models have attracted over 3.3 million downloads on Hugging Face and ModelScope. About Alibaba Group Alibaba Group's mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. The company aims to build the future infrastructure of commerce. It envisions that its customers will meet, work and live at Alibaba, and that it will be a good company that lasts for 102 years.
