Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Thomas Wolf: Everyone’s Using AI Wrong — Here’s How to Actually Win | Hugging Face CSO Explains

Episode Date: July 20, 2025

Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, the leading platform for open-source machine learning models, datasets, and applications, joins us to talk about the future of open-source AI, how non-coders can build powerful apps, what it really means to “own” your AI-generated content, and how robotics and LLMs are reshaping our world—from startups to our kids’ education.We also dive into the future of jobs, open-source trust, vibe coding, and whether your next AI assistant will be a talking duck.Links: Follow my Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠Companies & Products: ⁠⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠⁠

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We met at Viva Tech to talk about the future of work and how to stay ahead. What skills will actually matter in the age of AI? How do you stay relevant when entire industries are being disrupted? And how close are we to having robots inside our homes? So what's your advice to people who are so? studying for five years to do something that might be disrupted. Yeah, I would say the two advice. I mean, one is definitely...

Everyone, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We have Thomas today, his co-founder of Hugging Face. Thomas, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Please explain how can I, a non-technical person, use Hugging Face. Can you explain the concept? Okay, so, I mean, to be clear, Hugging Face is still mostly done for technical people.

Most part of the website are made for software developer who want to develop something with AI. So that's the two, we have three main parts on the website. We have models, data sets. You want to use them if you're developing a new app with an AI component. And you don't want to use a closed-source solution like Open AI Anthropic, but you want to be able to own the full stack. You want to have an open-source solution like your open-source code.

So in this case, you will go on our platform, you'll find, select the right model for your task, for the, for the application or website, you're building, and you'll download it. But there is one big part. One big part of the website that we created recently, and that's actually growing exponentially, which is much more accessible, it's called AI Apps.

It's kind of an app store of AI. So we call that Spaces. These are very kind of small website. You can go on HagiFace Spaces. You have a search bar and basically just type something you would like to do with AI. You can type, I don't know, I want to remove the background of an image.

I want to get the speech for a text and written, like 11 labs type thing. or I want to generate a 3D character out of an image. And here you will have like spaces that are created by community. You can select one. And here you have a very low code, easy button interface that lets you do this kind of magical things, basically. And you use them on your platform or you can migrate to your own app that you're putting with.

So the nice thing is you can use that directly from the platform. Then we provide the compute. It's like website, right? If you want to generate an image from a prompt, like mid-journey. Yeah. You type this. You have like a dozen of them.

Some of them are more likes, for instance. So you can select the more popular one, the most popular one. You go there, you type your prompt, you get the image. Now, let's say you want to do that offline, for instance. You can also get clone the space. You can download it. And then you can run it on your PC. If it's powerful, it depends a bit on the AI model.

Some of them are quite big. So you might need a quite a large model. Do I need a vibe coding app to make it an actual app? There is actually even one of the most popular space right now is a vibe coding space. It's a free one. It's called DeepSite. It's used the Chinese model, Deep Sik, which is a free, free model. But it doesn't run through the Chinese server, right? It's run locally.

So no worries about your prompts getting through the People Republic of China. But this is a vibe coding one that you can also download it and you can create a website. How do you think about ownership when you use somebody else's like open source code, for example, as a creator, I decide to create an app where I generate an image or like a character that I'm going to use later. And I use that app to create a character. Who ends up owning it? If I decide to migrate it later from my app, sell rights to Disney, etc., how do you think about it? So the way I think about it is mostly informed by what we have in code. So in code, we have this open source movements. And I mean, in a nutshell, the idea of open source is when you write some

code. Instead of just keeping it secret, you can also decide to share it with everyone. You can put a license on it and it's actually better to put the license usually. Most of this license, the most popular right now are the MIT or Apache license. What they will say is something a little bit like Wikipedia. Basically, you can use it, you can edit the content, but you're supposed to credit the original creator of the code. So basically, just not take credit for yourself on something that someone else has built. You can have also a more complex license where you will ask, you know,

the people to pay if they have a commercial application or something like that. Is this interesting for me? Because I've seen, like, for example, in media, sometimes you sell your image, like a photo to an agency for like $15. Yeah. And they put it on all the billboards cross country and make millions on it. And you're like, damn. And I sold it for $15.

You have to accept to lead that. Yeah. In software, we have the same problem, which is sometimes you, some people have created amazing software that power actually everything around us, including Linux or in the scientific computing, you have something very famous called NumPy, which every Pytortion, which everyone used somewhere. And these people have definitely not even a very tiny fraction of the business value that was generated out of this.

Do you think they're happy? Have you talked to? I think a lot of people do that for the mission. They think that is better to maybe earn less, but have some. something that's freely accessible that everyone can use without having to pay. I think it's a bit their choice because you can also decide to create a nice business and company around an open source model that's called OpenCore. One idea is that you open source a core base and then the feature that are more especially

interesting for business, maybe around security and maybe some features around, I don't know, how you integrate with additional business. Then you keep this private and make people pay for that. And the reasoning is if you need this feature, you're actually making money so you can share. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Let's talk about what Hugging Face would look like in two or three years. So what I see happening with the developer industry, I started coding apps.

I have no technical background, right? Do you feel like people who code become less technical? Or do you think people will get more and more education in coding? And because they want to touch upon that and integrate their apps and businesses? That's a good question. I think we'll see both, I would say. So what I definitely already see is a lot of my non-technical friends, for instance, entrepreneur, but they have like a business background.

Yeah. They definitely now play a lot with all the vibe coding tools, all the thing, and they definitely now create apps. I have a good friend living next door to me. He's an entrepreneur, but zero technical background. Now he does all the time, like lovable demo or things like that, to basically get the first prototype of 40 months to build. So I definitely see that, which is people that are non-technical who become user of this

and actually create very technical product. What I also see is, for instance, my son who likes to learn and he's learning coding, but very differently than me. So the way he learns coding right now is he will use this AI tool to generate stuff. And at some point when it doesn't work, that's where it starts diving the code. And it's like, oh, okay, and I don't understand. And the way I learned code was much more. I would learn the basics and I would learn the second level.

And so like very organized, I think, in a way. So they're learning that very differently. I don't think it's going to be less technical in the end. It's just a different way of learning where you directly get some results. Yeah. But then because these tools have some limitation, you still need to learn coding. I think it will still. So we'll need more developers.

Is that what you're saying? I think we also have a developer pool that will grow. Yeah. Interesting. Let's talk about your kids. Since you mentioned your son, he recently presented an app that he coded. What are you teaching your kids? And how are you raising them so that at 12 years old, they're already doing something really cool?

Yeah, it's a big question, huh? Yeah. I don't pretend to have any answer, I would say that I'm really certain of. What I know, I think, is there is some value that I would still think will be timeless. One of them is kind of creativity and maybe. Basically, you know, not being afraid of creating new things. Because I think in the future, there will always be LLM. What we see when we use them is that they're still not very good at creating

really novel thing. They're very good at doing what you can expect them to do. They're actually trained. They're trying to predict the most probable, the most likely next token, right? So when you ask them something, they will create the most likely thing. Often when you want to really create something new and you know, that very well. I guess, you know, when you create like a video and you want something, you have to be

creative. You have to invent something that's a bit out of the ordinary. If you just do the same thing as everyone, just nobody noticed you. Absolutely. And so these skills like this is maybe a fact of not being self-censored and being creative. I think we'll always be useful. How do you teach that? Yeah, I don't really know.

If they make a mistake, you're like, just try again. We've been teaching, trying to teach creativity for quite some time. I think in the US, it's very, it's very great. There is some country in Europe and you see that where it's actually very great. One example is we were talking just recently about Stockholm and the Swedish ecosystem. They have a lot of focus on creativity at school. I think it helps maybe also bringing out great entrepreneur like Daniel from Spotify, Sebastian von Clarena. The French system is not the best for creativity.

We're like, you're supposed to learn what's in the list and not to go too much out of the ordinary. I think probably you don't want to take too much inspiration for just the French system. Did you teach your kids to code? Did you tell them like, hey, this is where you have to be? This is the future. Like, sit down and code. Yeah, I tried, but it's always the thing with kids.

If you're too obviously trying to push something and they're just going to. They're going to say that's your thing. That's not my thing. So I tried just very smoothly. So one example, last Monday, I just brought in at a conference with me and just seeing an entrepreneur. It was like, oh, that's very interesting. So just trying to, I think a way to see that is you can just open their horizon.

Just try to show them a lot of things and not saying you have to do that, but just this is possible, right? Yeah. So it's the same with AI tools. You can just show them the tools and then they use them if they found it interesting or fun. And then they will do this themselves, hopefully, and discover this tool themselves. I know. I know. So my daughter is a four and five and I'm like, What do I teach them?

Like, what is the world going to look like? What do you think the world is going to look like? It's going to be very different, pretty sure. I mean, there will be common things. I'm pretty sure there will still be people talking, podcast, I think, because we really like human interaction. I think this won't disappear. But we'll have all this AI automation.

A lot of the work I do just now, this past few months have been around robotics. And we just acquired a robotics company. Is it going to be a commercial or? Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be very accessible robots that can be used mostly by developer, but I want to make it also something that you could even use with your kids to teach robotics if you want. One thing I do like about robots, for instance, give kind of physical presence to AI. Yeah.

Is it like AI? We just call it like even Alexa. We say, hey, Alexa, but you don't have any idea. Yeah. And I like the idea of having like a physical and AI is here. Yeah, you see some movement. Yeah. It's looking at this.

I kind of like this. Is it also going to be something like you have a robot, but then you go to Hagenface? and you can upload all the open source apps. And the cool thing is you can teach things to your robots and you upload them on a new face and you can share them with everyone in open source ways. One of the things with the robots is they can do, you buy them, they can do like 20 things.

And then when you actually explore them all, you just put the robot inside and it's well. But here, if it's connected to an open source repository that's growing with people inventing new things, the robot that helps you cook or the robots that, I don't know, play with this or the robots that can clean something, and that share them with everyone, you could have something that actually grow with time.

Yeah. I'm very excited about that. It looks like it's like kind of the future Apple store, right? When you have this device, but it's actually a robot, and you have all these apps that you can also tailor for yourself, like, a setup cameras for me or whatever. Just watch the sound. So I'm pretty bullish that in a couple of years,

we'll have quite a lot of robots going around, probably at conference like this. You start to have a lot of them also already. I saw a at a restaurant. A restaurant. Yeah, yeah. That was one at the restaurant. Just walking around.

Yeah. When I was having a baby, we had a robot in our hospital in San Francisco. Yeah. To move things about that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for like vetting, whatever. When is the year when every family,

I'm speaking for mom's year who hate laundry? When are we going to have a robot in our household to help us with daily things? How far are we from that? I think the technology itself is very close. I would say on the tech side and the maybe prototyping demo, I would guess next year can have some stuff. And then the main question is the price of this thing.

Price and regulation, I feel like. Price and regulation for sure. Yeah. There's two aspects. The security aspect will be very important for robots. I mean, there is question for safety in AI, but I mean, saying a bad word by chat GPT is not the same as a robot, like, you know, punching you.

benching something. So there will be a question like that. But the second one is if this robot costs like $80,000 or something like that. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates

who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. We're the Hartford, with decades of experience insuring millions of unique small businesses when it comes to your small business insurance. Thank you. One size absolutely does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at the the Hartford.com slash small business. What do you think it's going to cost next year? Yeah. So the early one that will still be like the

price of a car right now. I think you need two hands. I can grab things. So usually it's around 15, 20K. I would love to see them much cheaper. Do you think there's going to be subscription as well? Substribution. That's also possible. Yeah. Probably probably is going to be like that for the expensive one. But also, I don't think every robot has to be a humanoid. At Taki Face, we only do open source robotics. And the fun part about this is we can make a platform that a lot of people can use to develop different type of robots. So it can be just one arm, can be just a funny head that's move and talk,

can be just something that's work but has no arm. We made a robot duck. That's just a duck that's working around you. Very cute. So we can explore a lot of form factors and see which one will be actually the best in terms of price, possibility, capabilities. How do you make sure that if someone creates an open-source app for a robot,

that it doesn't have this spy element that monitors inside the house. Yeah, that's a big question. I mean, for both models and robots, already today models, I think one of the big advantage of open source is you can download and run them locally. So you download them and then you can even...

You don't have to talk to the internet. You can stop the Wi-Fi, and the thing is just cannot send anything and it can run locally. That's something you can only do with open source right now. So if you use chaty-DPT, you have always to send a thing. And for robots,

I think it will be very... important. If the Wi-Fi stop, what does your robots do? Okay, I don't know. It's like loading the dishwasher. I just let the thing fall and then. You want this thing to work, you know, even when there is like a problem. And also, you don't want them to communicate too much. I think you want privacy, very strong privacy with something that's in your house. So just to sum it up, you think next year we're going to have robots who are capable of doing things in a house. And then in five years, I would have a robot. Yeah. I think next year we'll see two things on the web on the LLM, we'll see agents that can do a lot of task, we start to see that today.

So a lot of complex tasks we do on computer, we be automated. We see a beginning of the same thing in the physical world with robots starting to be able to do some tasks, really. And this will just keep growing, quick growing with shine. And maybe the search trend that's a bit more complex, I think, will be, we start to have really this photorealistic content at scale. So video that are indistinguishable of reality with sound, that's also indistinguishable. And this will also be a big question, I think.

In my opinion, the optimistic way is we'll pay more attention to being face-to-face with someone because we'll know it's a real moment. And we'll know that every video call of thing can be actually a fake thing as well. So maybe giving more weight to the fact of being together in the same room. That's true. Being more human in a way. Yeah. So our present is iPhones.

I have mine here and a MacBook. in five years, AI. Do you see AI being in some piece of tech? And if yes, what is it? Is it a robot? Is it a wearable? Is it in glasses? Yeah, it's a good question.

My view of AI is we have a big trends that started last year, which is we can do much polar AI models that are actually very high performance. And so this means you can start to embed them a bit everywhere. There's a lot of people that are working on AI chips that will be much more optimized, consume less energy. And this, according to me, it points to a future where you have like, yeah, a bit diffused everywhere. Just like electronics, you know, we have electronics in a camera, in our smartphone.

And so we'll get used to having basically all our electronics system that just understand much better what we want to do. Let's serve up with this question. Imagine we're here in five years. And can you talk about the wildest thing that's going on in the world in five years? Yeah. One of my most exciting direction right now in AI is using all the techniques we've learned to train good AI models, so kind of train intelligence model, applying that to other field of research, applying that to discovering new materials for battery, applying that to weather prediction, applying that to fusion energy, you know. So my hope is in five years.

We have some of these things that are maybe not just a chat, but a chatbot. is nice, but it's not like changing the world in a way. It's not inventing things that make us actually solve big, big challenge, right? And so all these things that I grew up in general in the idea, AI plus science. So you take very smart AI models or you take just knowledge we have around this model and try to apply that to a scientific field where you can do a fundamental breakthrough. I think this is something that's exciting a lot right now. So do you think cancer will be cured in five years?

Yeah. Cancer, I'm not sure because it seems like the more we look in deeper. the more is kind of a very complex but definitely some disease and also definitely in material science there is some super exciting developments. Material science is kind of this unsexy

scientific field that actually can change a lot of things because it unlock smart better batteries like carbon dioxide trapping or this type of thing that can be fundamental in just solving huge whole climate change. And five years what do you think about

unemployment. A lot of people are worried about that when I come to a guy. I think there is two main trends. One that I used to be for a long time in this was yeah, we unlock so much creativity. Start from kids. You know, when I do a vibe coding with my kids, they have a lot of ideas for a website, a website to connect. We need like a website to share your cats with other people or like other things or like website. I love that idea. I love that Amateur football player with scouts. So they all of this idea and I'm like, this is great. And all of these could even be like potential companies or thing like that.

So you have this website where basically because it makes a lot of things very accessible, a lot of people can become entrepreneur basically. But it's also true that not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Like people, some people don't. And then I'm wondering because I was a former lawyer before starting HagiFace. So I was for six years in an intellectual property. And it's true that this field are going to be very strongly disrupted by AI. There's a lot of support function that are currently handled by many people

and that can definitely find the scope that AI can do. And it's also a field where you study, like, you do quite long studies. So you've studied five, six, eight years for your job. So it's not like you're going to jump directly to a new field. Exactly. So this type of profession. is the big question for me, is how can you handle that?

It's also a topic that I think very few governments or very few like, you know, a think tank are really currently tackling. Like a lot of people I feel like are more like, let's not look too much at this. Let's talk about, I don't know, the danger of AGI, you know, ruling the world instead of just something that's definitely going to happen

in the coming five years, which is big job disruption in some... So what's your advice to people who are studying for five years to do something that might be disrupted. Yeah, I would say the two advice. I mean, one is definitely use these tools and try to see what they are capable of because you want to become the master of this tool, right?

And you want to be able to use them in your profession. So you have to stay in touch with this revolution. You cannot just ignore it. And the second one would be, yeah, start to see if you don't want to be very creative. And, you know, like, once you start using this tool, what do you feel is the remaining exciting part of your job and is it something you're actually really happy to do and if not I think it's time

to see if you don't want to create something new or if you don't want to start something new. Yeah. And that was the first? You said you had two opinions on that. So the first? Yeah. I mean, the first one is everyone become an entrepreneur basically. Yeah.

But I think the second one is kind of the panel, which is I'm not sure everyone wants to become an entrepreneur. And so what do they do? And here I don't have a great answer. I think I think this is something that should be totally tackled at the society. It should be already being discussed in the government. It's obviously tied to, I don't know, universal basic income. But also, yeah, do you want to do that?

Or like maybe we're moving to a society. Some friends also think we're moving to a society where entertainment is going to be the main thing we create and consume as human. So this is possible future society. And there's also a big question there, which is, are we not going to lose a little bit of something of being human, if we automate so much of our life. I don't really have a big answer.

You have that with the GPS is a good example, right? So now... Very often we don't know where we are really in the city because it's so easy to be guided by the machine. Absolutely. So we think it lost a little bit of something. This is all very interesting. Thank you so much.

It's an amazing conversation. I don't know. I try to stay excited about the future, especially now you mentioned content creators, the driving force. Thank you so much. much for being here. It was really inspiring. Thanks. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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Fun discussion.