# Thomas Wolf Thomas Wolf (Thom) is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of [[HuggingFace]], and probably the most unusual résumé of the three founders. A PhD in statistical and quantum physics from the Sorbonne, a law degree, a stint at École Polytechnique, and a career as a patent attorney before he ever touched machine learning. He moved into ML because the startups he was filing patents for made it look more interesting than law. He was right. He met [[Clement Delangue]] and Julien Chaumond through a Stanford study group (he also knew Julien from a band they played in). In 2016 they started Hugging Face in New York as a chatbot app for teenagers. The real story started in late 2018: when Google dropped BERT, Thom's team open-sourced a PyTorch version within a week. That single move turned [[HuggingFace]] from a chatbot into the place researchers go to share models. Here's why I pay attention to him. He's the science-and-openness conscience of the company. He created the [[Transformers]] and Datasets libraries that thousands of research labs now run on, kicked off BigScience (the BLOOM model, one of the largest open AI research collaborations ever), and he's been pushing into open robotics with LeRobot. When most labs went closed, Thom kept arguing, loudly, that open science wins over the long run. That's a bet I happen to agree with. ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Thomas Wolf]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[Thomas Wolf]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Related - [[HuggingFace]] - [[Clement Delangue]] - [[Julien Chaumond]] ## References - [Personal site](https://thomwolf.io/) - [X / Twitter](https://x.com/Thom_Wolf) - [GitHub](https://github.com/thomwolf)