LeRobot Hackathon Plants Open-Source Robotics Flag in Miami Hub

Delangue Outlines an Open, Collaborative Future for AI

The two-day sprint began at 10:00 a.m. on 14 June when Hugging Face co-founder and chief executive Clem Delangue took the stage at The Lab Miami. In a wide-ranging fireside chat, he argued that the “real payoff” in artificial intelligence arrives only when research culture remains transparent, model weights stay public and robotic hardware is freely modifiable. Rather than quoting him verbatim, participants recalled Delangue warning that a world of proprietary household robots would “push innovation behind closed doors,” whereas open tooling encourages every lab, startup and student to improve the state of the art in plain sight. His remarks set the tone for a 36-hour marathon that unfolded in parallel with more than 100 satellite hackathon nodes spanning six continents.

Hardware, Cloud Credits and Exhaustive Builds

The hacking phase moved quickly from theory to practice. Teams assembled SO-ARM101 and SO-101 robot-arm kits, replaced stock grippers with purpose-built end effectors and flashed custom firmware. Thanks to complimentary GPU allotments supplied by Hugging Face, simulation environments spun up in the cloud almost as soon as code repositories were cloned. Some groups tackled imitation-learning pipelines—one demo showed a guitar-strumming arm trained purely on human demonstration—while others leaned on reinforcement learning to refine pick-and-place tasks. Every project slotted into one of five official tracks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning, New Robot Integrations, Hardware Mods, and Dataset & Tooling. Completed runs were recorded on video, uploaded and scored on a global leaderboard that treats Miami submissions the same way it treats entries from Nairobi, Seoul or Berlin.

A Cross-Section of Miami’s Growing Tech Scene

Attendance mirrored the city’s eclectic talent pool: freshman computer-science majors soldered side by side with venture-backed founders, and corporate engineers from Fortune 500 firms debugged Python scripts shoulder to shoulder with first-time hackers. The event follows the AI Agent Summit in April and the AI in E-Commerce Forum in May—both staged by Miami AI Hub and each drawing hundreds of participants. Collectively, these gatherings have helped reposition Miami from sunny fintech outpost to an emergent nerve center for generative AI and robotics.

Sponsors Keep the Machines—and the Humans—Running

Logistics and creature comforts were handled by two home-grown supporters. Cloud-cost platform Cast AI, fresh from a USD 108 million Series C round, underwrote enterprise-grade Wi-Fi and extra GPU time, while global dev-shop 4A Labs covered meals and late-night caffeine to keep compile jobs rolling. “Our volunteers turned an idea into a global showcase,” said Burhan Sebin, founder of Miami AI Hub, noting that the hackathon validated the city’s capacity to stage technically demanding events without importing outside manpower.

About Miami AI Hub

Founded with a mandate to link the AI ecosystems of the United States, Italy, Spain and Latin America, Miami AI Hub has already welcomed more than 4,000 participants, spotlighted over 50 early-stage startups and hosted speakers from NVIDIA, Apple, Google, AWS and other industry leaders. Acting as both community convener and startup launchpad, the hub provides mentorship, investor access and technical resources aimed at turning prototypes into commercial products that enhance daily life and transform entire sectors.