In February 2024, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (known as Ai2), the AI research institute founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, released the initial version of its large language model (LLM) OLMo. Ai2 described OLMo as a “truly” open source LLM, which was interpreted as a subtle shot against Meta (whose touting of Llama as “open source” has been met with controversy). Unlike Meta, Ai2 released OLMo under the widely-used Apache License and disclosed its training data, weights, logs, metrics, and inference code.

Nonetheless, OLMo has been largely overshadowed by Llama, which has emerged as the most popular “open source” LLM.

In an apparent attempt to change that, Ai2 recently partnered with Google to make the OLMo suite of models available to Google Cloud developers via Google’s Vertex AI Model Garden. In announcing the move, Ai2 and Google emphasized the openness of OLMo and highlighted contexts in which that openness is a powerful asset:

“This partnership is a reflection of our shared vision with Google Cloud to address the current limitations in AI deployment by building the next generation of truly open and trustworthy AI,” said Ali Farhadi, CEO, the Allen Institute for AI. “While openness is key to building trust and advancing the development of AI, accessibility and data privacy are similarly fundamental to the acceleration of innovation across industries. By providing access to its AI-enabled infrastructure to support advanced and efficient model training, Google Cloud is critical to ensuring we can deliver state-of-the-art, transparent AI solutions while adhering to the strictest privacy standards, paving the way for a more secure and impactful future with AI. This will ultimately empower entire industries and even regulated sectors like government, health, sciences and more to do something they simply can’t today: transform their domains with truly open AI.”

“In the public sector, trust is paramount. Transparency and accessibility are not just ideals; they are the foundation for deploying AI that improves citizen services,” said Karen Dahut, CEO, Google Public Sector. “True openness, particularly in the creation and validation of AI models, is crucial for building that trust. Ai2’s commitment to fully open training code, evaluation methods, and data aligns perfectly with our mission to drive responsible and effective AI innovation within government. We are proud to partner with Ai2 to deliver AI solutions directly to researchers, government agencies, and other public sector leaders to ensure widespread benefits to citizens.”