'Open source will win': Allen Institute for AI CEO Ali Farhadi on the new era of artificial intelligence
GeekWire
GeekWire
4.4 • 116 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It has been a wild few weeks and eventful few months in AI: DeepSeek, OpenAI, Stargate, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Elon Musk, and more.
In all of this, there's a heightened focus on what it takes to train AI models and the importance of open-source AI. This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we get insights from Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), the Seattle-based nonprofit that has been innovating in open-source AI since long before it was popular.
"If the U.S. wants to maintain its edge ... we have only one way, and that is to promote open approaches, promote open-source solutions," Farhadi says, reflecting on the past few months. "Because no matter how many dollars you're investing in an ecosystem, without communal, global efforts, you're not going to be as fast."
Related Coverage and Links:
- Allen Institute for AI's new open-source iOS AI app runs on-device for secure, private, offline use
- Allen Institute for AI challenges DeepSeek on key benchmarks with big new open-source AI model
- Allen Institute for AI’s new model points to items in images, aims to make bigger point in industry
- New York Times: An Industry Insider Drives an Open Alternative to Big Tech’s A.I.
- Ken Yeung, "The AI Economy" newsletter: Ai2: The AI House That Paul Allen Built
- Ai2 Blog: OLMoE, meet iOS
Hosted by GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This Geekwire podcast is brought to you by BECU. |
| 0:04.1 | Stay tuned to the break as Brian Westbrook interviews BECU's Stacey Black for today's |
| 0:09.3 | money hack about social media trends like loud budgeting. |
| 0:13.2 | And for more money hacks, check out geekwire.com slash BECU. |
| 0:20.6 | By thinking about data in a different way, we actually showed that you could train a model |
| 0:25.8 | better than other models by using one 10,000s of the data, one 10,000s. |
| 0:32.1 | The comparison was with a model that was using 6 billion data points versus us using 700,000. And to me, |
| 0:40.2 | these are great points because that opens up the door to more and more people to start playing |
| 0:45.4 | in this game, making it more accessible. And the minute you actually unlock these barriers, |
| 0:50.6 | I think that's the moment that you see innovations just flourish at the pace that |
| 0:55.1 | we've never observed before. And those pieces are the pieces that are making us very, very |
| 0:59.0 | confident that open source will win this game. Nothing can outpace it. |
| 1:10.4 | Welcome to Geekwire from Geekwire.com in Seattle. I'm Todd Bishop. We are coming to you from |
| 1:15.5 | Seattle where we get to report each day on what's happening around us in business, technology, and |
| 1:19.9 | innovation. What happens here matters everywhere and every week on this show. We get to talk about |
| 1:24.3 | some of the most interesting and important stories and trends in the news. This week, I'm coming to you not only from Seattle, but from the banks of Lake Union and the |
| 1:34.3 | home of the Allen Institute for AI, because I'm joined this week by Ali Farhadi, CEO of the |
| 1:41.2 | Allen Institute for AI. Ali, it's great to have you here. |
| 1:45.4 | Thank you for stopping my talk. |
| 1:47.2 | Excited to have a conversation on AI. |
| 1:49.5 | Well, I'm excited to have this conversation too. |
| 1:54.1 | Around the middle of this week, I was thinking, you know, so much has happened over the past few weeks in this realm. |
... |
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