During last month’s NeurIPS 2025 conference, YC’s Diana Hu sat down with Thomas Wolf, co-founder and CSO of Hugging Face to discuss his unconventional journey from physics and law to building one of the most influential open-source AI platforms. They discussed why open research accelerates innovation, the real challenges of turning AI demos into products, and how great open models and the application layer unlock the biggest opportunities for founders.
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Chapters:
00:00 — From Physicist to Hugging Face Founder
01:50 — Switching Careers
02:45 — How Hugging Face Was Born (Almost by Accident)
04:50 — The Limits of Closed Models
05:45 — Why Demos Often Don’t Become Real Products
07:05 — Fine-Tuning vs. Scaffolding: Startup Tradeoffs
08:40 — Turning Research into Widely Used Products
09:50 — Designing Great Developer Experiences
11:55 — The Future: Open Models and the App Layer
