Hugging Face’s Chief Scientist Warns AI Risks Becoming ‘Yes-Men on Servers’

Hugging Face’s Chief Scientist Warns AI Risks Becoming ‘Yes-Men on Servers’

AI company founders have a reputation for making bold claims about the technology’s potential to reshape fields, particularly the sciences. But Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief science officer, has a more measured take. Image : Google In an essay published to X on Thursday, Wolf said that he feared AI becoming “yes-men on servers” absent a breakthrough in AI research. He elaborated that current AI development paradigms won’t yield AI capable of outside-the-box, creative problem-solving — the kind of problem-solving that wins Nobel Prizes. “The main mistake people usually make is thinking [people like] Newton or Einstein were just scaled-up good students, that a genius comes to life when you linearly extrapolate a top-10% student,” Wolf wrote. “To create an Einstein in a data center, we don’t just need a system that knows all the answers, but rather one that can ask questions nobody else has thought of or dared to ask.” Wolf’s assertions stand in contrast to those from Open…