creators

Thomas Wolf - Hugging Face co-founder and CSO

Thomas Wolf co-founded Hugging Face and is its chief science officer. He created the Transformers library; NVIDIA signed a deal to buy the company in 2026.

Thomas Wolf is a French machine learning researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded Hugging Face and is its Chief Science Officer. His own site says he has been at the inception of its open-source, open-science and robotics efforts. Wolf created and led development of Transformers, the model-definition library for state-of-the-art text, vision, audio and multimodal models, and of Datasets, and has since created or advised Diffusers, Accelerate, DataTrove, smolagents and LeRobot. He pushed open science through the BigScience workshop, which produced BLOOM, and through FineWeb and the Ultra-Scale Playbook, and co-authored the O'Reilly book Natural Language Processing with Transformers. He came to the field late: an Ecole Polytechnique graduate with a PhD in statistical and quantum physics from Sorbonne University and ESPCI, he spent five years as a patent attorney before joining Hugging Face. On 2 September 2026 NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.93 billion - about $11.9 billion to shareholders plus up to $1 billion in employee equity retention. The transaction has not closed: NVIDIA's filing expects completion in the first half of 2027, subject to customary conditions including regulatory approvals.

Specialization

open-source machine learning, NLP, open science, robotics

Country

France