Allen Institute for AI

Formation	2014; 10 years ago (2014)
Founder	Paul Allen
Type	Non-profit research institute
Location	Seattle, Washington, U.S.
Key people	Peter Clark, Yejin Choi, Noah Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Dan Weld, Chris Bretherton, Ani Kembhavi, Jes Lefcourt
Website	allenai.org

The Allen Institute for AI (abbreviated AI2) is a 501(c)3 non-profit research institute founded by late Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen in 2014. The institute seeks to conduct high-impact AI research and engineering in service of the common good.^[1] Oren Etzioni was appointed by Paul Allen^[2] in September 2013 to direct the research at the institute. After leading the organization for nine years, Oren Etzioni stepped down from his role as CEO^[3] on September 30, 2022. He was replaced in an interim capacity by the leading researcher of the company's Aristo project, Peter Clark. On June 20, 2023, AI2 announced Ali Farhadi as its next CEO starting July 31, 2023.^[4] The company's board formed a search committee for a new CEO. AI2 also has an active office in Tel Aviv, Israel.^[5]

Teams

• Aristo: Aristo is a flagship project of AI2 that was inspired by a similar project called Project Halo carried out by Seattle-based investment company Vulcan.^[6] The original project goal was to design an artificially intelligent system that could successfully read, learn, and reason from texts and ultimately demonstrate its knowledge by successfully passing an 8th-grade science exam – the team achieved this objective in 2018.^[7] The current focus of the team^[8] is to build the next generation of systems that can systematically reason, explain, and continually improve over time.
• PRIOR: The PRIOR team seeks to advance the field of computer vision by creating AI systems that can see, explore, learn, and reason about the world.^[9] The team released the open embodied AI platform AI2-THOR in 2016, supporting the training of AI agents in simulated environments.^[10] In February 2018, the team released the game Iconary as a demonstration of an AI that can understand and produce situated scenes from a limited set of icons.
• Semantic Scholar: Semantic Scholar tool is an artificial-intelligence backed search engine for academic publications publicly released in November 2015.^[11] It uses advances in natural language processing to provide features such as summaries for scholarly papers, contextual information about inline citations, and the ability to create libraries of papers and receive paper recommendations.^[12]
• AllenNLP: The AllenNLP team works on research to improve NLP systems' performance and accountability, and advance scientific methodologies for evaluating and understanding NLP systems. The team produces its own research as well as open-source tools to accelerate NLP research.^[13]
• MOSAIC: The Mosaic project is focused on defining and building common sense knowledge and reasoning for AI systems.^[14]
• AI for the Environment: These teams seek to apply artificial intelligence solutions to the prevention of poaching and illegal fishing in locations around the world, as well as environmental problems like climate modeling and wildfire management. The teams in this group include EarthRanger, Skylight, Climate Modeling, and Wildlands.

OLMo

On May 11, 2023, AI2 announced they were developing OLMo, an open language model aiming to match the performance of other state-of-the-art language models. In February 2024, it was open-sourced, including code, model weights with intermediate snapshots and logs, and contents of their Dolma training dataset, making it the most open state-of-the-art model available.^[15][16]