Earlier this week, a video of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang playing with a flock of waddling microducks during his keynote at the company’s GTC Berlin conference went viral. The robots, who stomped their little feet and made little R2-D2 noises, sat down, dropped dead for a “nap,” and fell on voice commands. They were so crazy cute that the next day pre-orders of the Microducks surpassed 20,000 units, Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue said in a tweet.
The Microducks are expected to ship in time for Christmas, which means these robots are already on their way to becoming the hottest toy of the holiday season. Delangue believes they will end up being the best-selling robot of the year, and possibly not even for children. The promotional videos show adults playing with them, too.
Microducks are open source devices produced by Pollen Robotics, a company that was acquired by Hugging Face in 2025, which means they are now an Nvidia company. The GPU giant acquired Hugging Face in September. This is actually Hugging Face’s second robot, after the also cute Reachy Mini.
Microducks were trained using Nvidia’s technology stack, where simulations taught them basic tricks (talking, sitting, standing, etc.) with which to ship. Pollen says owners can train their robots with new tricks and then share them with the community.
Here is the video below. Enjoy it as a palate cleanser after the scary black eye the AI industry has given itself this week, as AI involvement has been attributed to cyber attack after cyber attack. OK, AI could seriously damage the world. But it can also be fun. It’s hard to watch this video without ordering one.
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