Hugging Face teams up with Open Source for Science Fund to back maintainers of scientific AI's open source stack
Thom_Wolf · x · 2026-10-01
Hugging Face announced a collaboration with the Open Source for Science Fund, a multi-donor philanthropic effort seeded by Biohub and Wellcome under Renaissance Philanthropy, to identify the open source libraries scientific AI models rely on most and support the maintainers behind them.
Key facts:
- 200 new open source/open-weight science models are shared on Hugging Face each month, with over 40 million downloads
- Fields span protein structure prediction, molecular dynamics, drug discovery, medical imaging, weather forecasting, and astronomy
- ESM-2, released in 2022, still sees hundreds of thousands of monthly downloads thanks to ongoing maintenance
The fund notes the software stack underpinning training, finetuning, evaluation, and serving is almost entirely open source, yet receives the least attention, funding, and credit. The collaboration aims to identify critical libraries at scale and direct resources to their maintainers.
Related event: Hugging Face Partners with os4science to Fund Open Science Software(2 posts)→
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