Thomas Wolf: Everyone’s Using AI Wrong — Here’s How to Actually Win | Hugging Face CSO Explains

0:00This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Now at Lowe's, faster quotes start at the Lowe's Pro Desk. Got a material list handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo?

0:39Perfect. Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in-store or on Lowe's.com, right from the Lowe's Pro Desk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that at Lowe's. Something that's definitely going to happen in the coming five years. Big job description. This is Thomas Wolfe, co-founder and the chief science officer of Hugging Face, the open source platform shaping the future of AI. We met at Viva Tech to talk about the future of work and how to stay ahead.

1:16What 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 studying for five years to do something that might be disrupted? Yeah, I would say the two advice. I mean, one is definitely... Hello, everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley, girl. We have Thomas today, who's 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?

1:51Okay. So, I mean, to be clear, Hugging Face is still mostly done for technical people. Most parts of the website are made for software developers who want to develop something with AI. So 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 OpenAI Entropic, 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 application or website you're building, and you'll download it.

2:27But there is one big part of the website that we created recently, and that's actually growing exponentially, which is much more accessible, and 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 websites. You can go on Huggy Face, 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 unwritten, like 11 labs type thing. Or I want to generate a 3D character out of an image. And here you will have spaces that are created by a community.

3:06You can select one. And here you have a very no-code, easy button interface that lets you do these 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 a website, right? If you want to generate an image from a prompt, like Meet Journey, you type this. You will have like a dozen of them. Some of them are more likes, for instance. So you can select the most popular one. You go there, you type your prompt, you get the image.

3:39Now, let's say you want to do that offline, for instance. You can also git 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 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 DeepSight. It's used the Chinese model DeepSeek, which is a free model. But it doesn't run through the Chinese server. It runs locally. So no worries about your prompts getting through the People Republic of China.

4:18But this is a webcoding 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 open source code? For example, as a creator, I decide to create an app where I generate an image or 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, et cetera, how do you think about it? 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.

5:00You can put a license on it and it's actually better to put a license usually. Most of these licenses, license the most popular right now are the MIT or Apache license and 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 the original creator of the code so basically just you know 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 people to pay if they have a commercial application or something like that yeah so is this interesting for me like because I've seen like for example media sometimes you sell your image like a photo to an agency for like 15 dollars yeah and they put it on all the billboards cross-country and make millions on it you're like damn and i sold it for 15 dollars 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 you have something very famous called numpy which every pytorch and which every everyone uses somewhere and these people have definitely not earned even a very tiny fraction of the business value that was generated out of it do you think they're happy have you talked about i think a lot of people do that for the mission they think that it's better to maybe earn less but have something that's freely accessible that everyone can use without having to pay.

6:29I 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 open core. One idea is that you open source a core base and then the features that are more especially interesting for business, maybe around security, 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. Let's talk about what Hugging Face would look like in two or three years.

7:04So 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 because they want to touch upon that and integrate their apps and businesses? That's a good question. I think we'll see 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 and they definitely now create apps I have a good friend living next door to me he's an entrepreneur but zero zero technical background now he does all the time like lovable demo or things like that to basically get the first prototype of what he wants to build.

7:57So I definitely see that, which is people that are non-technical who become users of this and actually create very technical products. 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 he starts diving the code. And he's like, oh, okay. Now he's trying to 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.

8:31So they're learning that very differently. But 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. 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'll 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?

9:07Yeah, it's a big question. 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 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 things. They're very good at doing what you kind of expect them to do. They're actually trained. They're trained to predict the most probable, the most likely next token, right?

9:47So 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 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 yeah you should just do the same thing as everyone just nobody notices absolutely and so these skills like this this uh maybe a fact of not being self-censored and being creative i think will always be useful i think another yeah i don't really know if you make a mistake you're like yeah try again we've been teaching trying to teach creativity for quite some time, I think.

10:22In the US, 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 entrepreneurs like Daniel from Spotify, Sebastian from Klarna. The French system is not the best for creativity. We're like, you're supposed to learn what's in the list and not not to go too much out of the ordinary so i think probably you don't want to take too much inspiration from just the french sister 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 go yeah i tried but it's always the thing with kids if you're too obviously trying to push something they're gonna say that's your thing that's not my thing so i tried just very smoothly so one example next last morning i just brought in at a conference with me and just seeing a 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 you just try to show them a lot of things and not 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 yeah and discover this tool themselves i know i know like so my daughter is a four and five and i'm like what do i teach that like what is the world gonna look like what do you think the world's gonna look like five to ten years it's gonna be very different huh 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 will have all this AI automation.

12:12A lot of the work I do just now, this past few months has been around robotics. And we just acquired a robotics company. Is it going to be a commercial or? Yeah. It's going to be very accessible robots that can be used mostly by developers, 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 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.

12:45It's looking at me. 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 Hagenface and you can share them with everyone in open source ways. One of the nice 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.

13:24Yeah. 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 set up cameras for me or whatever. Where's 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 conferences like this. You start to have a lot of them also already. I saw a robot buggy at the restaurant. At the restaurant? There was one at the restaurant. When I was having a baby, we had a robot in our hospital in San Francisco.

14:02I had to move things around? Yeah, for like vetting, whatever. When is the year when every family, I'm speaking for moms here 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 that the technology itself is very close. I would say on the tech side and maybe prototyping demo, I would guess next year can have some stuff. And then the main question is the price of the thing. Price and regulation. Price and regulation, for sure. Yeah. 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, you know, by CGPT is not the same as a robot like, you know, making a big punch or something.

14:50So there will be a question like that. But the second one is if this robot costs like$80 ,000 or something like that. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com.

15:29Now at Lowe's. Faster quotes start at the Lowe's Pro Desk. Got a material list handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo? Perfect. Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in-store or on Lowe's.com, right from the Lowe's Pro Desk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that. At Lowe's. What do you think it's going to cost next year? Oh, like, this is in five years. So the early one will still be like the price of a car right now.

16:05I think you need two hands that 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? That's also possible. Yeah, probably it's going to be like that for the expensive one. But also, I don't think every robot has to be a humanoid. At HagiFace, 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 types 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 works but has no arm.

16:40We made a robot duck. That's just a duck that's walking 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 server okay you can stop the wi-fi and the thing is just cannot send anything and you can run locally that's something you can only do with open source right now so if you use chat tpt you have always to send the 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 let the thing fall i'm done 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 yeah 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 gonna have robots who are capable of doing things in a house.

17:51And 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 tasks. We start to see that today. So a lot of complex tasks we do on computer, we'll 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 with time. And maybe the third trend that's a bit more complex, I think we'll start to have really this photorealistic content at scale. So videos that are indistinguishable of reality with sound that's also indistinguishable.

18:28And 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 thing can be actually a fake thing as well. So maybe giving more weight to the fact of being together in the same room, which is 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 glasses? Yeah, it's a good question.

19:10my view of ai is um we have a big trends that started uh last year which is we can do a much more 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 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 ai a bit diffused everywhere just like electronics you know we have electronics in a camera, in a smartphone. And so we'll get used to having basically all our electronic systems that just understand much better what we want to do.

19:44Let's wrap 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 trained intelligence model, applying that to other field of research, applying that to discovering new materials for battery, applying that to, you know, 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 chatbot. A chatbot is nice, but it's not like changing the world in a way.

20:29Like it's not, you know, inventing things that make us actually solve big, big challenge, right? And so all these things that I group them generally in the idea of 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. So you think cancer will be cured in five years? Yeah, these type of things, right? Yeah. Cancer, I'm not sure because it seems like the more we're looking deeper, the more it's kind of a very complex, but definitely some disease.

21:00And also definitely in material science, there is some super exciting development. material science is kind of this unsexy scientific you know field that actually can change a lot of things because it unlock smart metal batteries like carbon dioxide trapping all this type of thing that can be fundamental in you know just solving huge problem like climate change in five years what do you think about unemployment a lot of people are worried about that when it comes to I think there is two two main trends uh one that I used to be for a long time in this was um yeah we unlock so much creativity starts from kids you know when I do uh vibe coding with my kids they have a lot of ideas for website a website to connect we need like a website to share your cats with other people like other things or like website to connect like amateur football player with scouts so they have all of this idea and I'm like this is great and all of this could even be like potential companies or things like that.

22:00So you have this website where basically, because it makes a lot of things very accessible, a lot of people can become entrepreneurs. 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 these fields are going to be very strongly distributed by AI. There's a lot of support functions that are currently handled by many people and that can definitely fall in the scope that AI can do. And it's also a field where you study, you do quite long studies.

22:39So 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. 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 uh you know ruling the world instead of just something that's definitely going to happen in the coming five years which is big job destruction in some in some so what's your advice to people who are studying for five years to do something that might be disrupted yeah i 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?

23:29And 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. 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, 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.

24:05Yeah. 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 this is something that should be probably tackled at the society. It should be already being discussed in the government. So 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.

24:39And 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 lives. I don't really have a big answer. We had that with the GPS is a good example, right? So now we can't read the maps anymore. 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 definitely 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.

25:16Thank you so much for being here. It was really inspiring. Thanks. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-CONTACTS Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at$50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates, and more.

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