Artificial intelligence is advancing at a remarkable pace, but a crucial question remains: who decides how it is built, shared, and scaled? At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27-29 in San Francisco’s Moscone West, we will explore this topic with Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face. He will lead a session on what it takes to make cutting-edge research and models truly open and accessible. You can catch him on the AI Stage alongside thousands of other like-minded tech leaders and innovators.
The future of AI will not be defined solely by closed labs and large tech budgets. It will be written in open-source repositories, global research collaborations, and ambitious experiments that anyone can build upon. Wolf offers a rare perspective on how to bridge research, community, and real-world applications in ways that shape both the technology and the ecosystem surrounding it.
Whether you are a founder, developer, or investor, this session provides a clear view of where AI is headed and how openness can drive the next wave of breakthroughs.
Wolf has been at the center of some of the most important advances in artificial intelligence. At Hugging Face, he helped launch the Transformers and Datasets libraries. He led the BigScience Workshop on large language models that produced BLOOM and has been a champion for open science across both industry and academia. He is also the co-author of Natural Language Processing with Transformers and The Ultra-Scale Playbook, resources that are shaping how the next generation of AI practitioners learn and build.
Join over ten thousand startup and venture capital leaders from October 27 to 29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The event features headline-making sessions, hands-on discussions, and intentional networking designed to fuel your next move. TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is where the future of technology gets built and where we celebrate twenty years of TechCrunch. Secure your pass now to save up to six hundred sixty-eight dollars with Regular Bird pricing before it ends on September 26 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.
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