Thomas Wolf
Paris, France
The physicist-turned-patent-attorney who co-founded Hugging Face – now powering over a million developers and hosting 500k+ models – on a mission to make AI open, ethical and accessible to all.
Interests
Impact
$4.5B+
Recent valuation
250+
People employed
15+
Early stage investments
$390M+
Funding raised
5M+
Customers served
10+
Countries Operated In
$70M+
Annual recurring revenue
Early life and programming spark
Thomas was born in France. As a child, he began experimenting with early personal computers, teaching himself to program in C and assembly on his father’s machine, an early creative outlet that would quietly shape his future.
World Map
Paris, France
FR
Thomas was born and raised in France. Paris is where he studied at École Polytechnique and completed his PhD in statistical and quantum physics. He also earned a law degree at Panthéon‑Sorbonne and studied intellectual property at CEIPI – all in the French capital.
Press
Bloomberg.com
Watch Hugging Face Looks to Open-Source AI Robotics
11th July 2025
Fortune
AI systems are unlikely to make the scientific discoveries some leading labs are hoping for, Hugging Face’s top scientist says
20th June 2025
Fortune
Hugging Face gets into the humanoid robot game with Pollen Robotics purchase
14th April 2025
TechCrunch
The AI leaders bringing the AGI debate down to Earth
19th March 2025
Business Insider
AI is creating 'overly compliant helpers,' not revolutionaries, said the top scientist at Hugging Face
7th March 2025
TechCrunch
Hugging Face’s chief science officer worries AI is becoming ‘yes-men on servers’
6th March 2025
Fortune
Lessons on open-source AI from Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf
8th October 2024
Media
Career Milestones
Hugging Face
Hugging Face is a company that builds tools for machine learning, with a focus on natural language processing. They are known for their Transformers library, which provides thousands of pre-trained models to perform tasks on texts, images, and audio.
2017 – Present
Cabinet Plasseraud
Cabinet Plasseraud is an intellectual property firm that assists clients with patents, trademarks, designs, and copyrights. They provide services for protecting and defending intellectual property rights.
2011 – 2017
Pierre and Marie Curie University
Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC) was a public research university in Paris, France, specializing in science, engineering, and medicine. It was a leading institution in scientific research.
2008 – 2011
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that conducts unclassified scientific research. It is managed by the University of California and focuses on energy, environment, and computational sciences.
2006
Alcan
2005
Early Stage Investments
In science, asking the question is the hard part. Once the question is asked, often the answer is quite obvious, but the tough part is really asking the question, and [AI] models are very bad at asking great questions
Philanthropy
LeMaterial
An open source initiative aiming to facilitate AI for materials discovery releasing datasets, hash function and tools to explore the chemical space for material design
Dataset of 6.7 million entries
Supports researchers globally
Speeds up materials discovery2025 – Present
Global
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