Now it’s mounting a powerful second act, joined by a wave of AI open-source enthusiasts. In 2024 the AI leader Hugging Face developed an open-source platform for AI robots, which already has 3,500+ robot data sets and draws thousands of participants from every continent to join giant hackathons. I’m not proposing to reject AI hardware but to reject the idea that innovation must be proprietary, elite, and closed. That means putting our investment, time, and purchases towards robot built in community labs, AI models trained in the open, tools made transparent and hackable. Ayah Bdeir is a leader in the maker movement, a champion of open source AI, and founder of littleBits, the hardware platform that teaches STEAM to kids through hands-on invention.