"The numbers of people who are going to be able to become AI builders is going to explode. It's gonna go from maybe a few hundred thousands or low millions… to maybe tens of millions, fifties of millions, maybe a hundred million at some point."
Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, believes we are entering a new phase of AI – one where building models, fine-tuning systems, running local AI, and even experimenting with robotics may no longer be limited to a small technical elite.
His passion for open source is very contagious! I enjoyed chatting with him about:
Why the next wave of AI builders won't be traditional engineers – and how that could push the field beyond slop toward biology, medicine, and climate
What open source actually solves in cybersecurity – and why "safety" is often a cover story for business strategy
Why lobbying against open source in the US would be a strategic mistake that could cost the country its AI leadership
Why comparing open weights to closed APIs is irrelevant and why benchmarks miss what really matters
What Hugging Face is learning as agents become a new kind of user
How LeRobot and Reachy Mini are turning AI into something people lile
Why training, fine-tuning, and post-training on your own data are becoming the real differentiators as building apps gets trivial
What three months of paternity leave taught Clem
We also talk about fear-based AI marketing, how public perception shifts the moment people build with AI, what's missing in robotics datasets, and why Clem keeps coming back to Camus' Sisyphus as a metaphor for being a founder right now
A conversation about agency, openness, and what it means to democratize AI before it gets locked down. Watch it.
00:00 AI Builders Are About to Explode
00:35 Why Coding Agents Still Struggle with AI
02:23 100 Million AI Builders
03:30 Non-Technical People Entering AI
05:15 How Building AI Can Change Public Perception
06:22 Who Can Make AI More Open?
08:02 Fear-Based Marketing in AI
09:33 Open Source, Cybersecurity, and Risk
12:31 Why Companies Don’t Open Source
14:30 Lobbying Against Open Source
17:24 What Changed During Paternity Leave
19:11 Making Hugging Face Agent-Native
21:00 Hugging Face Robotics and LeRobot
23:01 Local AI, Open Models, and the Future
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Clément Delangue, co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face
https://x.com/ClementDelangue
https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdelangue
https://huggingface.co/clem
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Turing Post is a newsletter about AI’s past, present, and future. Publisher Ksenia Se explores how intelligent systems are built – and how they’re changing how we think, work, and live.
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