Google has taken a further step into the world of open source AI models, striking a partnership with the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (known by the acronym Ai2) that will see the non-profit AI lab offering its open source AI models and tools through Google’s Cloud Platform.
The Seattle-based Ai2 has developed some of the most capable and open large language models, which are called OLMo, and a family of multi-modal models called Molmo. Ai2 goes further than most players in the “open AI model” space, publishing all the data on which its models are trained as well as all of the model’s code.
Ai2 has also published the “recipes” for both training the base model and for further refinement of the model, known as “post-training,” that helps shape the format and tone of a model’s responses. "Post-training" is also used to implement guardrails that can make the model less likely to engage in unsafe outputs, such as telling someone how to build a bomb.
Other “open model” companies, such as Meta and AI startup Mistral, have released what-are known as “open weight” AI models. They publish the model’s code and the core numeric values that determine a model’s performance, but not the underlying data that was used to train the model or the exact recipe for how the model was trained.
Ai2’s most powerful model, which is OLMo 2 32B, which was released in March, outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini model, while using fewer computing resources to train than competing open weight models, according to benchmark tests the lab performed.
