Open Source Reachy Mini 🤖, Nvidia's Historic First $4 Trillion 💎, The ChatGPT Era for Robots Arrives 🚀
#33 The Maker's Robotics Brief 7/14/2025
Active Club’s Newsletter brings you the latest news and trends in manufacturing, robotics, and cutting-edge technology.
🗞️ This Week in Robotics
Reachy Mini – The Open-Source Robot for Today's and Tomorrow's AI Builders
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics have announced "Reachy Mini," an open-source robot designed for human-robot interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation.
Fully programmable in Python (with JavaScript and Scratch support coming), it features cameras, microphones, speakers, and enables rich expression through head and full-body rotation and animatable antennae.
Integration with Hugging Face allows leveraging the latest open-source AI models, and users can upload, share, and download community-created robot behaviors, making it an affordable experimental platform for AI builders, educators, researchers, and robotics enthusiasts.
📈 Market & Business
Nvidia becomes first company to hit $4 trillion valuation
Nvidia became the first company in history to surpass a $4 trillion market cap on the 9th as its stock rose 2.5%. With OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft and others continuing massive investments in Nvidia chips to build large-scale data centers supporting the AI revolution, the company's Q1 2025 revenue exceeded $44 billion, up approximately 70% year-over-year, with stock prices rising 1,500% over the past five years.
🧰 Resource & Tools
MCP Toolbox for Databases
Google has announced "MCP Toolbox for Databases" (formerly Gen AI Toolbox), an open-source MCP server for databases. It provides solutions to simplify development of tools for AI agents to access databases, with built-in connection pooling, authentication, and monitoring capabilities via OpenTelemetry.
🌈 Others
Jack Dorsey tests Bitchat — decentralized messaging without internet
Twitter founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey has announced the beta version of "Bitchat," a decentralized P2P messaging service that operates on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networks without requiring internet connectivity. The system needs no central servers or account registration, with end-to-end encrypted messages hopping between devices within 30-meter range, designed for communication in situations where internet infrastructure is unavailable such as conferences, protests, and disaster areas.
⚡️ Quick Links
The ‘ChatGPT Moment’ in Robotics and beyond
Robotics expert Paritosh Mohan analyzes that with Physical Intelligence's π-0.5 model release, robotics has reached the GPT-3 stage and is approaching its "ChatGPT moment." In the current Autonomy 3.0 era (foundation model era), Vision-Language-Action Transformers enable integrated learning and adaptation to new tasks within days, but achieving truly general-purpose robots still faces many challenges including long-term memory, real-world learning, efficient edge inference, and low-cost hardware, predicting that companies able to deliver immediate practical value will be the winners.
AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead
Google Research reports that AI-based code completion features have reached 37% acceptance rate in internal software development, with over 8% of code review comments resolved through AI assistance, significantly improving developer productivity.
Stay tuned for the next issue!
✍️ @nszknao_jp