Microsoft is bringing in a heavyweight artificial intelligence research team from the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) in Seattle and the University of Washington (UW), including former Ai2 CEO Ali Farhadi.
Farhadi, Hanna Hajishirzi and Ranjay Krishna are expected to join the AI organization led by Microsoft CEO Mustafa Suleyman while retaining their faculty positions at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering; former Ai2 COO Sophie Lebrecht will also join.
This series of joinings occurred just after Farhadi announced his resignation from Ai2. He announced his decision to leave on March 12, ending his more than two and a half years as the head of a non-profit research institution. Last week, Suleiman just adjusted his responsibilities within Microsoft, from being responsible for the consumer-oriented Copilot product to focusing on leading Microsoft's "Superintelligence" team.
Against the background of increasingly fierce competition in global AI computing power and large models, this recruitment highlights Microsoft's strategic considerations of reducing its reliance on OpenAI in cutting-edge large models, and at the same time further strengthening its self-developed basic model capabilities in the competition with Amazon, Google and other giants. The "super intelligence" team, established in November last year, is part of Microsoft's larger move to develop advanced basic models. Microsoft has previously recruited researchers from institutions such as Google DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Now, together with this group of scholars from Ai2 and the University of Washington, it will significantly strengthen Microsoft's strength in areas such as open source model development and training efficiency optimization - these areas are Ai2's long-term advantages of "doing big with small".
For Ai2, these departures constitute a significant brain drain. Ai2 was founded in 2014 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and has long been committed to open science and open source artificial intelligence research. Haji Hirzi is co-lead of the Ai2 open source language model project OLMo and co-principal investigator of a $152 million, five-year national AI initiative supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NVIDIA to build open AI models for scientific research. At the NVIDIA GTC conference held in San Jose last week, she attended multiple events as an Ai2 representative and participated in discussions on the future of the open source model with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.
Krishna led many key projects such as the Ai2 multi-modal model Molmo, and also delivered a speech on behalf of the institute at the just-concluded GTC conference. Farhadi himself is a computer vision expert and co-founded Xnor.ai, a startup incubated by Ai2; the company was acquired by Apple in 2020 for approximately US$200 million. He then took charge of machine learning-related work at Apple, and returned to Ai2 as CEO in July 2023.
Ai2 interim CEO Peter Clark confirmed the departures in a statement and emphasized that the agency remains committed to its stated mission and collaboration with NSF and Nvidia on projects including OMAI. He said that there is an experienced, broad and continuous team behind these projects, which is enough to continue and expand the impact of relevant work on the existing basis. Clark also expressed his gratitude to Farhadi, Haji Hirzi and Krishna for their leadership and contributions, and wished them success in their new positions.
Suleiman later posted an update on LinkedIn and spoke highly of the joining of this new group of colleagues. He specifically mentioned that under Farhadi's leadership, Ai2 had released more than a hundred models in one year; he also called Haji Hirchi "one of the most cited researchers in the field of natural language processing in the world." When commenting on Lebrecht, Suleiman noted that she drove Ai2’s expansion in operational scale and open source work, is also a co-founder of AI company Neon Labs, and holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Brown University. Suleiman said that this team will help Microsoft promote its mission of so-called "humanistic superintelligence", which is to create safer, controllable, and more powerful AI systems to serve humanity and the major problems it faces.
As early as the news of Farhadi's departure broke out earlier this month, Bill Hilf, chairman of the Ai2 board of directors, told GeekWire that Farhadi wanted to conduct research at the "extreme frontier" of AI, a level where for-profit companies are investing billions of dollars in training the most advanced models. He admitted that boards of directors must weigh whether nonprofits should and can use philanthropic resources to forge computing power and funding in the race to compete with tech giants for the largest models.
At the same time, changes in Ai2’s funding environment are also considered to be important background factors that prompted some researchers to leave. Ai2 was originally funded by Allen's Vulcan Inc. and later transferred to the administration of his estate. The current main supporter of the organization is the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST), which is a US$3.1 billion foundation established under Allen's instructions. It was officially announced in August last year. It focuses on supporting projects that apply science and technology to real-life problems in areas of Allen's focus, such as artificial intelligence, biological sciences and the environment.
According to people familiar with the matter, FFST prefers AI application-oriented research rather than high-cost cutting-edge large model development. Although Ai2's 2026 project funding has been fully implemented, FFST is shifting from an "overall annual funding" model to a "project-based application" mechanism. Future funding will be more biased toward real-world application scenarios rather than the construction of open source basic models. This explains to a certain extent why researchers who focus on model research and development choose to leave. A FFST spokesperson said that Ai2’s “work and mission remain unchanged” and that the foundation’s broader project strategy is still being developed.
For Farhadi, Haji Hirzi and Krishna, the core of their research lies in building and advancing the AI models themselves. Microsoft's "super-intelligence" team, supported by billions of dollars in computing power, provides them with the resources and space to continue exploring in this direction on a larger scale, and also allows them to extend their previous experience in open source and basic research in a commercial environment.