Allen Institute for AI - What is OLMo?

AI2: Allen Institute for AI releases fully open-source large language model

Hey Everyone,

Just like we predicted it’s open-source AI developments that are taking center stage so far in 2024.

There’s rarely been such an exciting time for Open-source LLMs as is the climate of 2024. From the saga this week of Mistral Miqu to the potential of Llama-3 later this year, it’s hard to keep up with everything.

But let’s give AI2 some credit here.

Nathan Lambert formerly at Hugging Face recently shared:

Today, we’re releasing our first pretrained Open Language Models (OLMo) at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), a set of 7 billion parameter models and one 1 billion parameter variant. This line of work was probably the main reason I joined AI2 and is the biggest lever I see possible to enact meaningful change in how AI is used, studied, and discussed in the short term.

OLMo will represent a new type of LLM enabling new approaches to ML research and deployment, because on a key axis of openness, OLMo represents something entirely different. OLMo is built for scientists to be able to develop research directions at every point in the development process and execute on them, which was previously not available due to incomplete information and tools.

Depending on the evaluation methods, OLMo 1 is either the best 7 billion parameter base model available for download or one of the best. This relies on a new way of thinking where models are judged on parameter plus token budget, similar to how scaling laws are measured for LLMs.

You can find the core model here: https://lnkd.in/gxkCzPnU
I wrote about it here (personal take): https://lnkd.in/ga5FQgu7
The technical paper is here: https://lnkd.in/gTMgiV-T

OLMo is entirely open source and a cross-institutional collaboration