Ai2 (Allen Institute for AI)
Ai2 is a nonprofit AI research institute based in Seattle. Paul Allen founded it in 2014.
Company & leadership
- Interim CEO
- Peter Clark
- Board chair
- Bill Hilf
Founder
- Paul Allen
An institute built for open research
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen established Ai2 to support fundamental AI research with practical uses. Its work extends to scientific discovery, robotics and conservation. The institute has a board and a separate scientific advisory board.
Research direction in 2026
In May 2026, Interim CEO Peter Clark described a focus on transparent models and scientific discovery. He identified the NSF OMAI effort, supported by the National Science Foundation and NVIDIA, as part of the next phase of open model development. Ai2 also develops Asta and AutoDiscovery research applications.
Models covered in this profile
Practical guidance. These articles cover reviewed Olmo, Tülu, SERA, Molmo, olmOCR and OLMoASR releases. They distinguish Ai2-trained backbones from adaptations of Qwen and Llama. The list is being expanded; it does not yet cover every historical checkpoint, research ablation or task-specific robot adaptation.
Open speech recognition
OLMoASR uses an audio encoder and text decoder. Its English-only training set contains 440,000 hours of weakly supervised audio and text. The release uses Apache 2.0.