2026 will be the year for AI for Science (and we're hiring for that!)
But 2025 was where we laid the foundations: datasets, benchmarks, tooling, partnerships, and (most importantly) community.
A few things I’m proud of from the past year:
🚀 We shipped and supported 20+ collaborations and releases, including:
- OpenFold3 (from the OpenFold Consortium)
- AQCat25 (a major catalyst dataset with SandboxAQ)
- the Antibody Developability Challenge (with $60,000 in prizes from Ginkgo Datapoints)
- and the ConStellaration dataset + challenge with Proxima Fusion
+ a steady stream of releases with teams at NVIDIA, IBM, and AI at Meta
📣 On the communications side, I spoke at World AI Summit (a panel + two fireside chats with the incredible Ben Kompa and Max Welling). We published blogs and resources for building across fusion, pharma data, antibody modeling, and more. There were papers like LeMat-GenBench (with a Hugging Face Space) and LeMat-Synth at NeurIPS (with the extremely good team at Entalpic).
🤝 There was “AI for Scientific Discovery is a Social Problem” (with Avijit Ghosh, PhD), which sparked a lot of scientists to reach out with real needs, ideas, and collaboration offers.
🛠️ Tooling-wise, with Quentin Lhoest and great open-source contributors, we’ve been pushing dataset support for scientific formats on the Hub (think FASTA, CIF, and other common bio/materials file types). I’ve also been supervising work to enable streaming and slicing large HDF5/HDF datasets, which matters a lot for physics-scale data (led by Mike Smith).
👯♂️ Community has been a big theme. After a viral post kicked things off, we launched Hugging Science: the Hub org is now ~800 members, the Discord is ~7,000 members (huge thanks to Adam Molnar), and there are multiple ongoing research projects there spanning topics like benchmarking PDEs, AI for allergies, and atomic simulation.
🔬 We also ran and supported a set of hackathons across microscopy, chemistry/materials, women’s health & longevity, cancer research, and protein folding.
🎉 One of my favorite moments: we hosted a Hugging Science event at NeurIPS— ~600 attendees, ~2,000-person waitlist, and a line around the block. Weeks later, someone recognized the limited merch in a totally different city and came over to talk science. That’s the kind of energy that this ecosystem is forming!
🔮 Looking to 2026: Hugging Science will be getting its own site (with dedicated resources for scientists) and we’re growing the team (EMEA and US roles), and we'll do stuff we can't even imagine yet!
🚀 If you want to be part of it: reach out, DM, or check out our careers page! If you know a friend, who would be a great fit, also let me know 🙏