Cofounder and Chief Scientist, Hug
Why Open Source AI Beats Big Tech - Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face Co-Founder | Due Diligence Ep. 7
Thomas Wolf is the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, one of the most important companies in open-source AI. Hugging Face has become the central platform for AI builders, researchers, and companies working with machine learning models, datasets, and open-source tools.
In this episode, Thomas explains how Hugging Face started as a game company, why the team pivoted into open-source AI, and how a weekend project around Google’s BERT model became one of the first major signals that Hugging Face could become much bigger. He also shares why open-source AI matters, how Hugging Fa...
About Thomas Wolf
Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, appeared at MACHINA 2026 in a fireside chat with OpenAI's Laura Modiano, where he discussed the intersection of foundation models and robotics. Wolf expressed skepticism about humanoid robots, describing them as "slightly scary" and stating a preference for "weird form factors" like rolling robots. He noted that robotics is "not yet a game of I need the largest data center" and that constraints like latency allow for the use of smaller, open-source models. Wolf also emphasized his excitement about the robotics community, particularly in Europe, and said he values seeing "people build in public." In a separate interview on the podcast "Due Diligence," Wolf discussed his background, including his PhD in physics and subsequent legal studies, explaining that he wanted to "understand how the world work" through both scientific and societal rules. He reflected on Hugging Face's pivot from a game company to an open-source AI platform, describing how a weekend project around Google's BERT model became an early signal of the company's potential. Wolf encouraged others to "take your own path" and noted that not following the "usual playbook of Silicon Valley" was a strength for Hugging Face.
Transcript (182 segments)
H
Henrik Johansson0:00
Good morning. Thank you so much for coming in. It's good to see you.
T
Thomas Wolf0:04
Thanks, Henrik.
H
Henrik Johansson0:05
Thank you. My name is Henrik Johansson, and this is Due Diligence. Due Diligence is a wonderful show, and we have with us Thomas Wolfe today, and we're very proud to have you. Tell me something. Who are you? And tell me a little bit about your origins. You are French, yes?
T
Thomas Wolf0:26
I am French, yeah. Grew up in France. I worked a little bit in the US. I then did a PhD in Paris. After that, I worked in many fields. I was a physicist first, the PhD and beginning of a postdoc, and then I switched to become a lawyer.
H
Henrik Johansson0:48
Yes, so you're both a doctor physicist and a lawyer.
T
Thomas Wolf0:52
Yes.
H
Henrik Johansson0:53
Would you represent yourself if you had a lawsuit?
T
Thomas Wolf0:56
[snorts] Uh, no.
H
Henrik Johansson0:59
I see.
T
Thomas Wolf0:59
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson1:00
In my venture capital work, I like to be a good guidance person, be on their board, help them see first, and importantly, you mentioned the importance of the government.
T
Thomas Wolf1:09
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson1:10
The morality.
T
Thomas Wolf1:11
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson1:12
And also importantly compliance, a compliance officer, and having at least what I would consider to be a high percentage of the race being focused on compliance. You are a doctor, yes? You are a doctor.
T
Thomas Wolf1:24
I mean, I'm a doctor in the physics PhD type of doctor. So if something happened to you right now, I'm not sure I can help.
H
Henrik Johansson1:29
I was going to ask, because I had, you may notice, I had a situation come up today. I was trying to pay, well, anyway, so you can't help me with that.
T
Thomas Wolf1:39
I can help you with the physics behind it, but I'm not sure a lot with the medicine and the chemistry that's happening in your body right now.
H
Henrik Johansson1:46
Let me close that off the list.
T
Thomas Wolf1:47
[laughter]
H
Henrik Johansson1:48
Have to call the American hospital system. Oh well. It seems interesting now, the SOC 2. It's like a type 2 is a software company audited certified terminal. That to me is the same as being a doctor, and you will always be a doctor. May I call you Dr. Wolf?
T
Thomas Wolf2:02
You can. I think in Germany, where you're from, I could add the name doctor on my passport.
H
Henrik Johansson2:09
Yes, I'm not from Germany.
T
Thomas Wolf2:11
Oh.
H
Henrik Johansson2:12
The lawyer is. Interesting. We touched on this a little bit ago. What motivated you, having achieved what you had achieved at that point, to do that? Because to me, a law degree, it takes time, yes?
T
Thomas Wolf2:26
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson2:27
Why? Why did you do that?
T
Thomas Wolf2:28
Why? Mhm. I think the common pattern of this part of my life was that I wanted to understand how the world works. And what are the rules that govern the world. So, physics has rules that govern the world.
H
Henrik Johansson2:50
Mhm.
T
Thomas Wolf2:50
But they're not the rules of society. The rules of society are made by law. So, I wanted to understand what is law. How does this thing work?
H
Henrik Johansson3:00
You seem to be very successful. The question, somebody I interviewed sometime in the past, I can't remember which individual, had to do with the horse being out of the barn. If I were conducting this interview, I would say the sheep, but to be fair to you, let's call it the wolf out of the barn.
T
Thomas Wolf3:18
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson3:18
What do we do to capture? How do we stop it from becoming misused? We create the technology, but we do it without compliance necessarily because so quickly, particularly in the United States.
T
Thomas Wolf3:29
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson3:30
You agree with me.
T
Thomas Wolf3:30
[snorts]
H
Henrik Johansson3:32
Yes. It's good that you do. Have to find some commonality. Hugging Face. Oh my goodness.
T
Thomas Wolf3:39
What is the name, man?
H
Henrik Johansson3:39
You became, how did you come up with that name? 2016, yes?
T
Thomas Wolf3:44
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson3:45
Tell me about that. That's fascinating.
T
Thomas Wolf3:48
I mean, we also did something not very compliant, is we pivoted. We started as a game company.
H
Henrik Johansson3:55
Yes.
T
Thomas Wolf3:56
And then we decided that it was more interesting to do something else.
H
Henrik Johansson4:00
Yes.
T
Thomas Wolf4:01
So the game company was, which was a fun, like little kind of Tamagotchi, you remember the days of the Tamagotchi? So you have this digital creature that you could talk to, that you could interact with.
H
Henrik Johansson4:16
Mhm.
T
Thomas Wolf4:17
And we wanted it to be used by, like, millennials, like people our age, 20, 30. So we aimed for a fun name. We thought an emoji would be fun. And our favorite emoji was the hugging face emoji.
H
Henrik Johansson4:33
Yes.
T
Thomas Wolf4:34
So we went for that. And then when at some point we decided to pivot to doing an open source company, we thought we could rename that, I don't know, the serious open source company, but we decided to keep Hugging Face as a name.
H
Henrik Johansson4:49
I think it actually speaks well because it makes people ask, 'What is that really about?'
T
Thomas Wolf4:54
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson4:54
Yes. Yeah. I actually applaud that. But the switch to open sourcing.
T
Thomas Wolf5:01
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson5:02
Mhm.
T
Thomas Wolf5:02
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson5:03
[clears throat]
T
Thomas Wolf5:04
We had to go back to our early VC and convince them. Luckily they were quite open-minded.
H
Henrik Johansson5:09
Were they?
T
Thomas Wolf5:10
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson5:10
Did it take a lot of convincing?
T
Thomas Wolf5:12
Not so much.
H
Henrik Johansson5:12
As a VC, how would you pitch me on that? Pretend that I am there now. I have to support that.
T
Thomas Wolf5:18
Mhm. As a European VC, well, we don't have so many European VCs, so I don't have a lot of...
H
Henrik Johansson5:26
Pretend I'm American. It's hard to believe.
T
Thomas Wolf5:30
I would say there is a great opportunity in open source in AI right now. It's the time to seize it. And we think we have the unique starting point to be the leaders in open source AI.
H
Henrik Johansson5:45
Do you have proof of concept?
T
Thomas Wolf5:47
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson5:47
You couldn't prove this to me?
T
Thomas Wolf5:49
Yeah. We had some strong traction at this time.
H
Henrik Johansson5:52
So you had that. And how much money were you trying to raise at that point?
T
Thomas Wolf5:55
Mhm, good question.
H
Henrik Johansson5:56
It's a historical question.
T
Thomas Wolf5:57
Yeah, this one was, I think, a series A probably, so like 20 million.
H
Henrik Johansson6:01
20 million, because you have 250 million in a more recent raise for something.
T
Thomas Wolf6:05
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson6:07
Interested to talk about that. Okay, that is fascinating. You have a long reach.
T
Thomas Wolf6:12
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson6:12
You are very charming.
T
Thomas Wolf6:13
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson6:14
You're smart. It seems like you're able to attract a lot of prospective investors. Am I correct?
T
Thomas Wolf6:19
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson6:21
And you are also an angel investor yourself.
T
Thomas Wolf6:23
I do that a little bit.
H
Henrik Johansson6:24
Do you like doing it, or do you prefer having other people give you the money? There's an accountability with that I think is a little different, yes?
T
Thomas Wolf6:32
I mean, both are very different. I do enjoy investing because first we had great angel investors ourselves, and I think it's great to give back.
H
Henrik Johansson6:41
Yes.
T
Thomas Wolf6:41
Yeah, and generally I think I can very easily relate to young entrepreneurs. And I feel like helping them is one of the best things I can do as a person who's slightly further along the path.
H
Henrik Johansson7:00
Walk me through the moment, then we are going to shift gears in reference to your time at the university. When you understood, the moment that you understood what you had built.
T
Thomas Wolf7:13
I think the moment started in Brussels. It was in November, so it was also pretty cold in Brussels.
H
Henrik Johansson7:22
To have something for winter.
T
Thomas Wolf7:24
Yeah, something happened in the winter. I take some decisions. Some of them are good, some of them are bad probably. And during the day I was attending this talk on natural language processing. And at night I decided that this new model from Google called BERT that they had just released like one week ago was kind of hard to use, or it could be repackaged in a way that would make it way more accessible. So, I decided with a small team from Hugging Face, also Victor, we had a first researcher and then one intern, and Patrick, another researcher, too. We decided to try to create a library around this that would make it way more accessible. So, we did that at night for one weekend, and then when we released it on the Monday, it went really viral on the AI circle, which was to be honest quite small at that time. It was not like millions of people were talking about AI in 2018. But all the researchers, a lot of academics, were very excited to be able to use BERT very easily. So, this was the first signal.
H
Henrik Johansson8:32
250 employees. Now, that's impressive. 8 years old. You mentioned learning models. Half a million machine learning models. In Silicon Valley that would be considered understaffed. So, my question, very much like I was showing you before...
T
Thomas Wolf8:49
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson8:50
How many hours of sleep do they get?
T
Thomas Wolf8:53
The employees? I don't know. I don't track the hours of sleep that they get. Should we?
H
Henrik Johansson8:57
Yes.
T
Thomas Wolf8:58
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson8:59
Yes. But from your blog post announcing the Pollen, is that how you pronounce Pollen?
T
Thomas Wolf9:06
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson9:06
Pollen.
T
Thomas Wolf9:07
Pollen.
H
Henrik Johansson9:08
Robotics acquisition, I will quote, to be factual. 'Robotics should be open, affordable, and private.' You have names for your robots?
T
Thomas Wolf9:20
Yeah. We have Richie.
H
Henrik Johansson9:21
Richie?
T
Thomas Wolf9:22
Yeah. Richie and Richie Mini, which is a smaller version of Richie.
H
Henrik Johansson9:26
I see. How tall is Richie?
T
Thomas Wolf9:28
Richie is this tall.
H
Henrik Johansson9:30
About...
T
Thomas Wolf9:30
And Richie Mini is this tall.
H
Henrik Johansson9:32
About 3 meters?
T
Thomas Wolf9:34
No, that's like 1 meter 50 or something.
H
Henrik Johansson9:36
Oh, from here?
T
Thomas Wolf9:37
Uh, from the ground.
H
Henrik Johansson9:38
I see. Oh, I see. Interesting. So, Richie, when the robot has a microphone or a camera, sits on a desk in a home. I want to know. Visitors arrive, yes? Let's say it's home, and friends arrive, or a repairman, a child. You have children? They have not consented to the camera. This is my question. They have not consented to the microphone. Walk me through your disclosure protocol for non-users.
T
Thomas Wolf10:16
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson10:17
Feel of you?
T
Thomas Wolf10:17
I think that's something we should train our user to, because we don't, like, the user usually hosts the software that runs this robot on their laptop. But now you make me realize that the users are not trained for compliance. So, I'm not sure they make anyone visiting their house sign the relevant disclosure form.
H
Henrik Johansson10:37
Is that not a concern? Is there a need to get that done?
T
Thomas Wolf10:41
Yeah, they might be sued.
H
Henrik Johansson10:43
Let me make a note of that.
T
Thomas Wolf10:45
At least in Europe.
H
Henrik Johansson10:46
Might...
T
Thomas Wolf10:47
We should probably give them details on the relevant laws.
H
Henrik Johansson10:53
I can help you with this.
T
Thomas Wolf10:55
We would need you on our board, I think, to...
H
Henrik Johansson10:57
I think you're saying you need me?
T
Thomas Wolf11:00
[laughter]
H
Henrik Johansson11:00
I'm available.
T
Thomas Wolf11:01
You're free? I feel like you're very busy with all your investments. I'm not sure if you have some more time to...
H
Henrik Johansson11:07
I have my interest and my focus on a very narrow set of areas. I'm most concerned about things that are done without consent. Without privacy manuals.
T
Thomas Wolf11:17
Mhm.
H
Henrik Johansson11:18
Thomas. In March of 2025, you published an essay recently, about a year and 2 months ago. I have a copy. My assistant has it in the other room.
T
Thomas Wolf11:30
Good that you read it.
H
Henrik Johansson11:31
I am ready.
T
Thomas Wolf11:32
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson11:33
I like to be prepared. You argued that current artificial intelligence systems are, and I quote, 'overly compliant helpers.'
T
Thomas Wolf11:43
Mhm. Oh, yeah, of course.
H
Henrik Johansson11:45
And let me say, I have noticed that this word would raise your interest.
T
Thomas Wolf11:50
[gasps]
H
Henrik Johansson11:51
Yes. You said 'yes men on servers.'
T
Thomas Wolf11:54
That's a good sign actually for AI, you know.
H
Henrik Johansson11:57
It may be a good sign, but forgive me, Thomas, because I do not understand. A computer cannot be compliant.
T
Thomas Wolf12:01
Oh, how come?
H
Henrik Johansson12:02
No, because compliance is a property of you, of me, of human beings, of institutions, of the auditable computer, what a computer does. It's much like this chess game, yes? Which we didn't play.
T
Thomas Wolf12:17
No.
H
Henrik Johansson12:18
I'll make a move. Boom.
T
Thomas Wolf12:22
I should make the most compliant move, which I guess probably this one.
H
Henrik Johansson12:26
Excellent. That's how I would have measured you. I would have known that. I already anticipated. In fact, I had 5 euros that I had wagered on that.
T
Thomas Wolf12:34
Oh, no.
H
Henrik Johansson12:35
I will use them to invest with my other million euros that I would like to invest with you.
T
Thomas Wolf12:38
Okay. Okay.
H
Henrik Johansson12:40
It's 5 to 10 million euros actually that I'm looking for this year. Why do you feel that a computer can be compliant, when in fact compliance is a property of human beings? You have, ooh, go.
T
Thomas Wolf12:51
So, my take is that compliance is a property of fulfilling a set of obligations set by the law or directive or an administration, which can be fulfilled by many things and doesn't have to be only human. But I found interesting the direction you're going, because I feel like you could go to the end where I think compliance would be the roots of consciousness.
H
Henrik Johansson13:26
The roots of consciousness. I'd love to see you explore that. Do you mind if I write that down?
T
Thomas Wolf13:31
[laughter]
H
Henrik Johansson13:32
Continue. You have 1 minute and 12 seconds remaining. You may use it as you choose.
T
Thomas Wolf13:36
Okay. I mean, if a computer program or an object actually fulfills the set of criteria set by the authority as compliance, let's say GDPR or cookie law, then this website can be compliant. Doesn't have to be a human. That's my take.
H
Henrik Johansson14:04
I want to get your email address so we can have the more extensive debate.
T
Thomas Wolf14:08
[laughter]
H
Henrik Johansson14:08
Okay. You need to win it on this chessboard first.
T
Thomas Wolf14:11
It probably won't happen in the last 2 minutes and 16 seconds we have remaining in our interview.
H
Henrik Johansson14:17
You are a most engaging guest. If there was one piece of information, and seriously, and we have been serious, people watching this, our podcast, I think find some interest, they find some humor, but there's ultimately a truth, a core. A lesson, a message. Your message that you would want to convey to the young 18-something year old, 18-20 year old that's starting out. What would it be for you today in 2026, in the world going so quickly, what would you recommend? What would you say to them?
T
Thomas Wolf14:53
I would say feel free to take your own path, to think for yourself, like we did when we decided to be Europeans making a US startup and not following the playbook, the usual playbook of Silicon Valley. I think that was our strength. I think if you come from a strange background, if you're like me, you grew up in France and then you move to many countries and you feel somewhere not maybe not at home in any of these places, I think it can be your strength.
H
Henrik Johansson15:36
And yet you still migrated back and came back to Europe.
T
Thomas Wolf15:40
Yeah.
H
Henrik Johansson15:40
Which is also perhaps a lesson. Silicon Valley seems to be a nice place. I enjoy coming here. I like being in New York City as well.
T
Thomas Wolf15:48
I think the main problem to close is that the croissants are still better in Europe.
H
Henrik Johansson15:54
Yes. You speak of something very interesting. I must give you a gift. Being that I thought your name, I will talk to my handler about that and we will make sure that they have some discipline. It has to be disciplined. Yes. I thought that you were a sheep. I'm sorry. So now I have for you...
T
Thomas Wolf16:20
Oh, that's very good. Thank you.
H
Henrik Johansson16:21
A sheep in sheep's clothing.
T
Thomas Wolf16:23
[laughter]
H
Henrik Johansson16:23
Yes?
T
Thomas Wolf16:24
Okay.
H
Henrik Johansson16:25
Now I'm going to, I'm going to...
T
Thomas Wolf16:27
It's a beautiful picture.
H
Henrik Johansson16:28
To Thomas from Henrik Hudson. And today is May 20th, 2026. I want to give this to you. I want you to frame this, and when I come visit you and invest my 100 million euros or whatever, I will ask you to make sure that you say that you have it with...
T
Thomas Wolf16:49
Thank you. I love it.
H
Henrik Johansson16:50
Thank you. You do love it. Thank you. Yeah. I thank you for being here with us. It was a great interview, and believe it or not, it is at exactly 12:00 noon Pacific Daylight Time.
T
Thomas Wolf17:00
Indeed. That's impressive. I was not expecting anything other than that. But I'm pleased.
H
Henrik Johansson17:05
Appreciate that. I said take this seriously. It was a pleasure being with you. Thank you so much.
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