Computer vision expert Ali Farhadi is set to return to Allen Institute for AI (AI2) on July 31 as the second chief executive officer in the Seattle-based non-profit research organisation’s history, after leading Apple’s AI and ML initiatives since January 2020. He is also the man behind YOLO Object detection and was a senior research manager at AI2 from 2014 before joining Apple.

Looking Back

Farhadi is a stalwart in the AI community. He completed his doctorate in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, specialising in computer vision and working under the supervision of South-African-born American computer scientist David Forsyth. Following that, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, under the guidance of Russian-American computer scientists Alexei A. Efros and Martial Hebert. Currently, Hebert holds the position of director at the robotics institute. 

Read more: What is Microsoft Without OpenAI?

Farhadi is also a professor at Paul G Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington where he leads the Reasoning, AI and VisioN (RAIVN) lab along with professor Ranjay Krishna. He also co-founded the first on-device deep learning company, XNor.ai with Mohammad Rastegari which was acquired in 2020 by Apple at $200, aiming at their increasing interest in investing in AI capabilities. 

When Apple acquired Xnor.ai, it aimed to leverage its expertise in AI on the edge, which allows ML and image recognition to be executed on low-power devices rather than relying on the cloud, aligning with their focus on privacy and preserving data on mobile devices. The AI2 backed Xnor.ai also saw investments from Madrona Venture Group and the University of Washington. 

Farhadi’s research have garnered worldwide acclaim. His profound contributions have won accolades such as the best paper awards at esteemed conferences including CVPR, NeruIPS, AAAI, and NSF. In 2014, he was honoured as an Allen Distinguished Investigator. 

The illustrious Sloan Research Fellowship was bestowed upon him in 2017, further cementing his reputation as an exemplary scholar. In recognition of his achievements, he received the prestigious Early Career Academic Achievement Alumni Award from UIUC in 2019. Furthermore, Farhadi was among the esteemed scholars selected as the inaugural recipients of the Google Fellowship. 

A Deserving Successor 

Farhadi takes over from Oren Etzioni, who was chosen by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to establish AI2 about 10 years ago. Etzioni revealed his intention to resign as CEO last year, stating that he would remain on the board, provide guidance, and serve as the technical director of the AI2 Incubator. Researcher Peter Clark has been the interim CEO. “As we face unprecedented changes in the development and usage of AI, I could not think of a better time to return to AI2 as CEO,” said Farhadi.

He further added that today more than ever, the world needs truly open and transparent AI research that is grounded in science and serves as a platform where data, algorithms, and models are open and available to all and renowned researchers and engineers at AI2 find themselves in a unique position to spearhead this innovative and trustworthy approach to AI development.

In 2010, Etzioni joined AI2 and became a significant figure in the AI field. He was an accomplished entrepreneur and also taught at the University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. With over 15 PhDs, Oren specialised in areas such as machine reading, data mining, web search, and software agents.

Etzioni and Allen established the Allen Institute for AI in early 2014. 

What Next?

A month ago, AI2 announced the building of AI2 OLMo, an open generative language model with over 70 billion parameters that is expected to launch in early 2024. Unlike other models, OLMo is designed by scientists for scientists, with a focus on advancing language model research. The initiative aims to provide access, education, and collaboration opportunities to the research community and the public. The project is being developed in partnership with AMD and CSC, using the environmentally friendly LUMI supercomputer.

Earlier, former chief scientist of Tesla Andrej Karpathy returned to OpenAI. Several other Google and Meta researchers joined OpenAI recently. Similarly, Ian Goodfellow left Apple to join Google DeepMind. So now with Farhadi, we only hope that AI2 will also report some breakthroughs in the near future, just like DeepMind and OpenAI.

Read more: Paul Allen liked the fact that I wasn’t an academic: Dr Oren Etzioni, CEO, AI2