Thomas Wolf is the Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Hugging Face, the company behind the open-source library and platform that has become the standard way practitioners share and build with machine learning models, datasets, and demos. He and his teams are on a mission to catalyse and democratise responsible ML and AI research by creating large-scale open-source and open-science projects, an effort that has helped bring state-of-the-art NLP and, later, generative AI within reach of developers and researchers everywhere.

Thomas is also a co-author of Natural Language Processing with Transformers, the O’Reilly book that has guided thousands of practitioners through building with transformer models using the Hugging Face ecosystem.

His path into AI was anything but linear. Before founding Hugging Face, he earned a Ph.D. in statistical and quantum physics, then a law degree from Sorbonne University, and worked as a physics researcher and later as a European Patent Attorney across the USA, France, and the Netherlands. That mix of science, law, and entrepreneurship shapes how he thinks about open innovation, licensing, and the responsible development of powerful AI systems. He currently resides in the Netherlands with his family.