New Way Now: Ai2 is building open models to help advance AI research with Google Cloud

Featured in this video: Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)
Summary: The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is a non-profit research institute dedicated to building breakthroughAI to solve the world’s biggest problems. To achieve this ambitious goal, Ai2 collaborated with Google Cloud to build a platform that empowers its multidisciplinary teams - researchers, clinicians, biologists, and more - to conduct cutting-edge AI research. Leveraging Google Cloud's AI-optimized infrastructure and advanced AI and ML capabilities, Ai2 is providing open access to models, data, code, and standards to advance scientific discovery, address global challenges in healthcare, life sciences, the environment, and shape a more equitable and sustainable future for all.
Challenge: One of the core pillars of Ai2’s open-first approach is sharing its work publicly and transparently to empower others to benefit from state-of-the-art AI. Ai2 wanted to create a platform that would not only enable more seamless collaboration and innovation across its diverse research teams but also provide the robust, scalable infrastructure needed to successfully develop its foundational AI research.
Solution: Partnering with Google Cloud, Ai2 developed a platform that enables its research teams to build state-of-the-art, truly open AI models, such as its OLMo large language model and Molmo family of multimodal models. Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure, including GPUs, TPUs, and CPUs, offer a range of options for every AI workload, enabling Ai2 to tackle a wide variety of AI use cases that help address global challenges. In addition, Ai2 also has access to the full power of the Google Cloud ecosystem, including the latest AI advancements, such as generative AI, enabling the development of AI tools and agents to assist researchers with literature review, hypothesis formation, and experimental design.
Results: Now, Ai2 has a powerful and efficient platform that is primed to accelerate its mission of building AI to solve the world’s biggest problems. With help from Google Cloud, Ai2’s research teams have access to everything they need to build, train, and serve truly open AI models - laying the foundation for the next generation of safe, sustainable, and accessible AI research that can benefit everyone.
Google Cloud Products used: A3 Mega and C3 VMs, NVIDIA H100 GPUs, and Cloud Storage.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI:
→ “True openness is what’s missing from the AI landscape. AI is evolving today from various different aspects, but the one we care about is how we make models, infrastructure, and ecosystems accessible to a wide range of audience. That’s the most important element in empowering the rate of progress for AI.”
→ “When we think about AI development, training these models, serving these models - these are impossible without infrastructure. Google Cloud has played a key role actually shepherding this whole space forward. Once you have a model, what do you do with it? How do you actually use it for enterprise? All of those are different pieces of the puzzle [where] Google Cloud actually has - and I suspect will - play a key role in the future.”
→ “I love to see a future where AI is helping other disciplines - science, climate, cure[s] for diseases. We’re seeing sparks of these things happening, but we're not there yet. We need openness, we need community, and we need all of us to work together towards that mission. With Google Cloud, the performance that we're getting, the optimization that exists, the quality of the engineers that we interact with. We manage[d] to build state-of-the-art models in their class. It’s fascinating to see what we as a whole community can do with Google Cloud that we couldn’t do before.”
Learn more:
→ Official Ai2 website: goo.gle/42uscSI
→ OLMo 2, The best fully open language model to date: goo.gle/4ga5EcV
→Molmo, A family of open state-of-the-art multimodal AI models: goo.gle/42r54nQ