Thomas Wolf
Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face
A physicist turned open-source AI builder who helps make models, datasets, and research tools accessible through Hugging Face.
Biography
Thomas Wolf is a co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face. His early career was in physics: after graduating from École Polytechnique, he worked on laser-plasma research and completed a doctorate in statistical and quantum physics at Sorbonne University and ESPCI. He later studied law and worked as a patent attorney before moving into machine learning.
At Hugging Face, Wolf helped develop and guide open-source libraries that make AI research easier to reuse. His work includes Transformers and other tools for datasets, diffusion models, distributed training, and agents. These libraries provide shared interfaces and implementations, helping developers work with models without rebuilding the surrounding software from scratch.
Wolf also contributed to open-science efforts such as BigScience, the collaboration behind BLOOM, and co-authored Natural Language Processing with Transformers. His public interests extend to robotics and AI for scientific discovery. His contribution combines technical infrastructure, collaborative research, and education, with an emphasis on helping a wider community inspect and build on AI systems.
Notable contributions
Helped create the Transformers library
Co-authored and helped build the open-source library providing reusable implementations of state-of-the-art models.
Supported the BigScience collaboration
Helped organize open-science work that produced the BLOOM language model.
