What's up with… Hugging Face, ChatGPT, Sparkle | TelecomTV
AI never sleeps, and not a week goes by without a deluge of news about it. A couple of quick items to end this short week (roll on the Easter break...)
Hugging Face Expands into Robotics
Hugging Face, the leading AI developer platform, is broadening its activities with the acquisition of France-based Pollen Robotics for an undisclosed sum. Pollen Robotics builds open-source humanoid robots designed for advanced research and real-world applications. Its latest generation is the $70,000 Reachy 2, designed to explore human-robot interactions, machine learning applications, and practical AI-driven tasks.
Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief scientist at Hugging Face, believes that robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI, emphasizing that it should be open, affordable, and private. Hugging Face's LeRobot library, created last year, supports open robotics development. The GitHub repository has grown from zero to more than 12,000 stars in twelve months, democratizing access to robotics technology.
Latest Updates from ChatGPT
ChatGPT has shipped its latest o3 and o4-mini models, the newest additions to its series of "omni" foundational AI models. These reasoning models can now agentically use and combine every tool within ChatGPT to provide detailed answers in less than a minute.
OpenAI o3 is now the most powerful reasoning model in the portfolio, while OpenAI o4-mini is a smaller, cost-efficient model. These new models are available to paying users, with an additional o3-pro version expected to be released soon with full tool support.
Sparkle Joins Research Project
Sparkle, the global operator business of Italy's TIM Group, has partnered with the European Union-funded research project Ecstatic to enhance submarine cable systems' detection capabilities for seismic phenomena. By integrating high-speed optical communication with sensing, submarine fibre-optic cables could become a global distributed sensing system for earthquake and tsunami detection.
This initiative requires new communication techniques, signal characteristics, and network architectures. Sparkle's BlueMed submarine cable system is being used to validate these technologies, with the involvement of Sparkle's Network Operation Center (NOC) in Catania for data storage. Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle, highlights the company's vision to push the boundaries of digital networks and play a critical role in seismic monitoring and network protection.
