What Allen Institute for AI does
Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is a Seattle-based nonprofit AI research institute founded in 2014 by the late Paul Allen, focused on building and advancing “truly open” AI to solve major scientific and societal problems. Ai2’s stated mission is to build breakthrough AI to solve the world’s biggest problems, emphasizing transparency, reproducibility, and broad community access to research artifacts (data, code, model weights, training recipes, and evaluation tools).
Strategically, Ai2 operates like a public research lab with multiple model and application lines: (1) open language and multimodal model development (e.g., Olmo and Molmo families), (2) open post-training and training infrastructure aimed at making model behavior understandable and extensible (e.g., Tülu 3 and Olmo 3’s “model flow” concept), and (3) AI systems for applied scientific discovery (e.g., AutoDiscovery and related evaluation/agent ecosystems).
Institutionally, Ai2 also acts as a compute-and-infrastructure steward for open scientific AI, including an NSF/NVIDIA-funded effort (NSF OMAI) to build a national open multimodal AI infrastructure and develop fully open AI models for the U.S. scientific community.