Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf just challenged Anthropic CEO’s vision for AI’s future — and the $130 billion industry is taking notice
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Summary
Hugging Face founder Thomas Wolf has refuted the idea that artificial intelligence can deliver a “compressed 21st century” of scientific progress.
Such a vision, espoused by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, proposes that advanced AI systems working at “10x-100x human speed” could achieve a century’s worth of progress in five to 10 years.
But Wolf argues that current AI systems are more likely to produce “a country of yes-men on servers”, and that academic success and scientific genius require “different mental approaches”.
He criticised existing benchmarks for testing AI systems for their focus on convergent thinking rather than the divergent thinking that delivers scientific breakthroughs.
Wolf suggested new benchmarks should test whether systems can “challenge their own training data knowledge” and “take bold counterfactual approaches” to generate new questions.
The exchange highlights a growing divide in how leaders approach the role of AI in scientific discovery, with profound implications for business strategies and research priorities.