Webinar: Olmo, Molmo, and Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science ft. Noah Smith, NSF OMAI

On July 28, 2026, NSF CI Compass hosted Noah A. Smith, of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure for Science (OMAI), to present "Olmo, Molmo, and Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science."

Abstract

Modern AI systems are often cast as products: a model, a chatbot, an API. But when we think about using AI for science, that framing is too narrow. What scientific communities need is open AI infrastructure: data, codebases, pre- and post-training recipes, documentation, evaluations, and access to model flows across stages of development, not just a final released set of model weights. In this talk, I will use Ai2’s Olmo project portfolio as a case study in what it means to build that infrastructure in the open. Drawing on recent results from our team, including work that exposes and studies multiple stages of model construction rather than only final models, I will argue that openness at the level of infrastructure is not only a scientific virtue but a practical necessity. If researchers are going to build AI systems for their own communities, and if universities, nonprofits, and governments are going to harness AI to serve the public interest, they must be able to invest in, contribute to, and use open infrastructure. Our goal is not to reproduce commercial AI, but to create a healthier open ecosystem to accelerate scientific discovery.

Biography

Noah A. Smith is the inaugural Vice Provost for Artificial Intelligence and Charles and Lisa Simonyi Endowed Chair for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies at the University of Washington, where he is also a Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He is Senior Director of NLP Research at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, directs the OLMo open language modeling effort, and leads the NSF- and NVIDIA-supported project “Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science.” His research spans language and music technologies, multimodal AI, and multifaceted evaluation of AI systems.

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