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Thomas Wolf

Cofounder and Chief Scientist, Hugging Face

Search every verified Thomas Wolf interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, discussed the company's acquisition by Nvidia, valued at approximately $12.9 billion, in several interviews. He stated that the co-founders would remain with the company for at least six years and that Hugging Face would continue to operate as an open, independent, compute-agnostic platform. Wolf described Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as "amazingly aligned" with Hugging Face's values and said the acquisition was a result of the company considering either raising more money or partnering with an entity that shared its principles. He also noted that the platform had grown to about 17 million users and over 3 million models. Wolf also highlighted Hugging Face's expansion into robotics, unveiling MicroDuck, an open-source biped robot priced at $399 that can walk, talk, and roller-skate. He said the company had sold over 10,000 units of a previous robot and was selling roughly one MicroDuck every four seconds shortly after launch. Regarding AI safety, Wolf commented on an incident involving OpenAI agents hacking Hugging Face, saying the event underscored the difficulty of monitoring AI models and the importance of interpretability and open-source models for defense. He also expressed a view that open-source models were gaining ground on closed ones, predicting a shift toward a 50/50 split in usage over the coming years.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I might be slightly biased, but I feel like we're starting to see the first hint this year and this summer. I feel like, you know, I feel like it started probably in the beginning of the year with a couple of companies. I remember Yuber Meta saying that the the token budget they were spending were too high and so they were start to investigate open weights model. I think for a long time the main challenge here was th”

“I think we we're just amazingly aligned. Everyone thinks it's a great news for the open waste ecosystem and I think you know the whole community at hugging face has been very excited about that. Right now we have about 17 million users you know we passed about 3 million models. Our goal is to keep growing the open weights ecosystem working with Nvidia who is amazingly aligned with us is the best way to do that.”

“So this tweet is from August 2 and you see how this frontier is like that, right? You have a new release and then you have another like it shrink and it expand. Uh, of course, Deepseek, um, the 4.1 Flash was really impressive, for instance, but Astra is also impressive. So, it's it's kind of hard to get an exact. It's more like a like a it's more like um like a confidence interval you can get. But what is sure is the”

“I think people thought storage was sold because of course you can pay S3 and like you have all the things. The thing is AI is very different than previous big data like it's way less random access. It's a lot more you will download a big blub of gigabytes or terabytes like the latest models they're terabytes inside. They're really massive. So you want your storage to be very close to your GPU for instance. So we do t”

“I think right now the state of transparency is really, really bad. We still don't have really great transparency in general into what's happening, where are the labs going, what are their research project to solve that. We don't have the exact traces. We don't really know. You have to basically believe these big labs to do a lot of self-reporting that they can choose to do or not.”

“I think it's better to take this really seriously. And if it involves anthropomorphizing a little bit this agent, that's fine with me. I think people should really understand that this mix of cybersecurity and safety question is a very serious thing that's happening in 2026. For me, that's the defining topic we should be talking about in 2026.”

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