Who's who · Research institutes
Ai2
Seattle non-profit AI research institute known for fully open language models such as Olmo
At a glance
- Founded
- 2014
- Based in
- Seattle, United States
- People
- Peter Clark, Interim chief executive
- Known for
- Olmo, Molmo, Semantic Scholar, Asta
- Licence
- Apache 2.0 (Olmo 3)
- Funding
- Non-profit, founded with Paul Allen's backing
- Founder
- Paul Allen
- Website
- https://allenai.org
Ai2, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is a non-profit research institute in Seattle founded in 2014 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It does foundational AI research and releases large open models, data and tools, with further work in AI for science, robotics and environmental conservation.
Ai2 is best known for its fully open approach to language models. Its Olmo family publishes model weights together with the training data, code and intermediate checkpoints, so others can study and reproduce how a model was built; Olmo 3, released in November 2025, is under the Apache 2.0 licence. Other projects include the Molmo multimodal models (which handle images as well as text), the Tülu models, the Semantic Scholar research search engine, the Asta platform for AI-assisted science, and OlmoEarth for Earth observation.
Ali Farhadi stepped down as chief executive in March 2026. Peter Clark, a founding member of Ai2 who also led it on an interim basis in 2022, is interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor.
Sources
- Ai2, About Ai2, 2026-10-02
- Ai2, What's next for Ai2: A conversation with Interim CEO Peter Clark, 2026-05-01
- GeekWire, Allen Institute for AI CEO Ali Farhadi steps down as nonprofit navigates shifting AI landscape, 2026-03-12
- Hugging Face, allenai/Olmo-3-1125-32B, 2025-11-04
Facts last checked 2026-10-02