AI nonprofit CEO says 'closed nature' of most artificial intelligence research hinders innovation

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A year before Elon Musk helped start OpenAI in San Francisco, philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen already had established his own nonprofit artificial intelligence research laboratory in Seattle

A year before Elon Musk helped start OpenAI in San Francisco, philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen already had established his own nonprofit artificial intelligence research laboratory in Seattle.

Their mission was to advance AI for humanity's benefit.

More than a decade later, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or Ai2, isn't nearly as well-known as the ChatGPT maker but is still pursuing the “high-impact” AI sought by Allen, who died in 2018. One of its latest AI models, Tulu 3 405B, rivals OpenAI and China's DeepSeek on several benchmarks. But unlike OpenAI, it says it's developing AI systems that are “truly open” for others to build upon.

The institute's CEO Ali Farhadi has been running Ai2 since 2023 after a stint at Apple. He spoke with The Associated Press. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Our mission is to do AI innovation and AI breakthroughs to solve some of the biggest working problems facing humanity today. The biggest threat to AI innovation is the closed nature of the practice. We have been pushing very, very strongly towards openness. If you think about open-source software, the core essence was, ‘I should be able to understand what you did. I should be able to change it. I should be able to fork from it. I should be able to use part of it, half of it, all of it. And once I build my thing, I put it out there and you should be able to do the same.’

It is a really heated topic at the moment. To us, open-source means that you understand what you did.