Ai2
nonprofitThe Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is a nonprofit research institute founded in 2014 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, headquartered in Seattle. Funded by the Paul Allen estate ($3.1B foundation) with annual budget exceeding $100M, plus $152M from NSF and NVIDIA for the OMAI scientific-AI initiative (2025). ~300 researchers.
Ai2's defining contribution is the OLMo (Open Language Model) ecosystem — the first competitive LLM to release everything: weights, training data, code, logs, and thousands of intermediate checkpoints under Apache 2.0. OLMo 1 (Feb 2024) established the paradigm; OLMo 2 (Dec 2024, up to 32B/6T tokens) was the first fully open model to outperform GPT-3.5 Turbo; OLMo 3 (Dec 2025, 32B, 65K context, Think variants) introduced 3-stage training with mid-training and long-context phases. The latest OLMo Hybrid (Mar 2026) combines Gated DeltaNet + Transformer at 3:1 ratio, reaching OLMo 3 quality in 35% fewer tokens.
The OLMo stack includes Dolma (3T+ token open pretraining corpus), Tülu (post-training framework introducing RLVR — Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards), OLMoE (first fully open MoE LLM, 6.9B/1.3B active, 64 experts), and OLMES (evaluation standard). In March 2026, Ai2 lost CEO Ali Farhadi and several key researchers to Microsoft's Superintelligence team, though all 2026 programs remain funded.
People
- Ali Farhadi Google ScholarOpenReview — Former CEO (departed Mar 2026 to Microsoft Superintelligence) (formerly University of Washington (Professor))
- Hannaneh Hajishirzi Google ScholarOpenReview — Former Senior Director (departed Mar 2026 to Microsoft) (formerly University of Washington (Professor))
- Noah A. Smith Google ScholarOpenReview — Senior Director of NLP Research; OLMo co-director (formerly University of Washington (Professor, VP for AI))
- Nathan Lambert Google ScholarOpenReview — Post-training Lead (Tülu, RLVR) (formerly UC Berkeley (PhD))
- Dirk Groeneveld Google ScholarOpenReview — Principal Researcher (OLMo lead author)
- Luca Soldaini Google ScholarOpenReview — Lead Research Scientist (Dolma lead)
News
- 2026-03-10 Ai2 CEO Ali Farhadi Steps Down; Microsoft Hires Key Researchers — GeekWire
- 2025-08-01 Ai2 and UW Awarded $152M from NSF and NVIDIA for Open Scientific AI — GeekWire