Hottest toy for Christmas? Nvidia CEO plays with adorable Microduck robots, 20,000 sell

In Brief

Earlier this week, a video of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang playing with a flock of waddling Microducks during his keynote astatine the company’s GTC Berlin league went viral. The robots, stomping their small feet and making tiny R2-D2 noises, sat, fell down dormant for a “nap,” and summersaulted connected dependable command. They were truthful darn cute that by the adjacent day, preorders of the Microducks surpassed 20,000 units, Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue said successful a tweet.

The Microducks are expected to beryllium delivered successful clip for Christmas, meaning these robots mightiness already beryllium connected their mode to becoming the hottest artifact for the vacation season. Delangue thinks they mightiness extremity up being the best-selling robot of the year, and perchance not adjacent for kids. The promotional videos amusement adults playing with them, too.

Microducks are open-source devices produced by Pollen Robotics, a institution acquired by Hugging Face successful 2025, which means they are present a Nvidia company. The GPU elephantine bought Hugging Face successful September. This is really Hugging Face’s 2nd robot, aft the also-cute Reachy Mini.

Microducks were trained utilizing Nvidia’s exertion stack, wherever successful simulations of them were taught basal tricks (walk, sit, stand, etc.) that they vessel with. Pollen says that owners tin bid their robots with caller tricks and past stock them with the community.

Here’s the video below. Enjoy it arsenic a palate cleanser aft the scary achromatic oculus the AI manufacture gave itself this week, arsenic AI engagement was blamed for cyberattack aft cyberattack. OK, AI mightiness earnestly harm the world. But it tin beryllium fun, too. It’s hard to ticker this video without ordering one.

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