Florent Daudens: How Open-Source AI Puts Newsrooms Back in the Driver’s Seat

What if the future of journalism isn’t locked behind the paywalls of big tech companies, but freely available to every newsroom willing to embrace it?

Too often, the conversation around AI in newsrooms centers on big tech, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. These are powerful tools, no doubt but they come with caveats: mainly cost, limited transparency, and little to no control over where your data ends up.

But there’s another world of AI rapidly evolving in parallel and it might be journalism’s best path forward: open-source AI.

In this episode of Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy reconnects with returning guest Florent Daudens, now the Press Lead at Hugging Face, one of the leading platforms powering open source AI. Formerly a newsroom leader driving AI integration at Canada’s Radio-Canada, Florent now sits at the heart of the open source AI movement.

Key topics include:

• Why open source AI matters for journalism and how it compares to proprietary models
• The rise of AI agents and what they mean for editorial control and user experience
• How compressed, privacy-first models running on laptops and phones could change the game
• The environmental cost of AI and how newsrooms can make more sustainable tech choices
• What news apps might look like in an agent-powered future
• How newsrooms can start experimenting with open source AI (no dev team required)

Plus, Florent shares 20 must-know open source AI tools for journalists, explains how writing is building in the age of AI, and discusses why owning the experience, not just the content, will be key to journalism’s survival

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