Hugging Face Co-Founder on Open-Source, Microduck, and NVIDIA | E2339
Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, joins This Week in Startups to discuss open-source AI models, the Microduck robot launch, and how decentralized AI infrastructure works.
The gist
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Open-source models are now less than one year behind frontier models like Claude and GPT-4, and the gap keeps closing.
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Hugging Face earns over $100M ARR from AI-optimized storage, not token inference, by pre-warming data next to GPUs.
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Microduck, a $399 robot, sold 16,000 units with no traditional marketing by targeting non-technical users with 15+ pre-built behaviors.
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Wolf says robo-taxi economics favor fleet orders of 25,000+ units, likely pushing companies like Lucid away from consumer vehicles.
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"I told her — go take the flyer that you made, upload it into Claude, and just ask Claude, 'Look over this. What changes would you make?' And it did an amazing job. It redid the ..."
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"This show is so much fun. It's that classic reality competition series where it ends in cliffhangers. You're constantly waiting to see who's going to drop out next. Anyway, tons..."
"I told her — go take the flyer that you made, upload it into Claude, and just ask Claude, 'Look over this. What changes would you make?' And it did an amazing job. It redid the ..."
"I introduced him to Abigail Shrier of Bad Therapy fame. Great book by the way."
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"I wanted to make a tutorial post on Twitter on how to do that, and basically my tutorial ended up just being: ask Codex or Claude Code or Grok to do that for me."
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