Thomas Wolf

Thomas Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) of Hugging Face, the collaborative open-source platform for machine learning that hosts over 1 million public models and is valued at $4.5 billion. After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), he researched laser-plasma interactions at the BELLA Center of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He completed his Ph.D. in Statistical/Quantum Physics at Sorbonne University and ESPCI, working on superconducting materials. He then pivoted to law, earning a degree from Pantheon Sorbonne University and spending five years as a European patent attorney at Cabinet Plasseraud. In 2015, consulting for deep-learning startups, he recognized that many AI methods were re-branded statistical physics approaches and taught himself modern ML. In 2016, alongside Clement Delangue and Julien Chaumond, he co-founded Hugging Face in New York City, initially as a chatbot app before pivoting to become the central hub for open-source AI. Wolf created the Transformers library (158k+ GitHub stars) and the Datasets library, co-authored the O'Reilly book 'Natural Language Processing with Transformers,' initiated and led the BigScience research workshop that produced BLOOM (a 176-billion-parameter multilingual LLM), and now leads Hugging Face's push into open-source robotics with LeRobot. His papers have been cited over 55,000 times.