Ai2

Why they matter

Tracked through public AI activity and peer connections inside the directory.

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Articles & links

Our paper on retrofitting language models to operate over bytes – the approach behind Bolmo – has been accepted to Nature! 🎉 We’re also releasing new checkpoints that extend our method from Olmo to Qwen & Llama. 🧵 buff.ly/l5ILoNT

Retrofitting language models to operate over bytes - Nature nature.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • A two-stage 'byteification' retrofit used less than 1% of a typical pretraining budget, totaling 49.1 billion tokens across both stages.
  • Bolmo 7B, retrofitted from OLMo 3, scored a +16.5% absolute improvement in STEM tasks over the earlier byte-level BLT 7B baseline.
  • The method also converted Qwen3 8B into Bwen 8B and Llama 3 8B into Blama 8B, adding between 1.5% and 4.5% parameters.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 4d ago

Our paper on retrofitting language models to operate over bytes – the approach behind Bolmo – has been accepted to Nature! 🎉 We’re also releasing new checkpoints that extend our method from Olmo to Qwen & Llama. 🧵 buff.ly/l5ILoNT

Retrofitting language models to operate over bytes - Nature nature.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • A new 'byteification' recipe retrofits existing subword language models into byte-level models with just 49.1 billion extra training tokens, under 1% of a typical pretraining budget.
  • Applied to OLMo 3 7B, Qwen3 8B Base and Llama 3 8B, the retrofits (named Bolmo, Bwen, Blama) stay within ±5% of their source model parameter counts.
  • Bolmo 7B records a +16.5% absolute improvement in STEM tasks over the prior byte-level baseline BLT 7B, with Bwen 8B improving on every category except GenQA.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 4d ago

Our paper on retrofitting language models to operate over bytes – the approach behind Bolmo – has been accepted to Nature! 🎉 We’re also releasing new checkpoints that extend our method from Olmo to Qwen & Llama. 🧵 buff.ly/l5ILoNT

Retrofitting language models to operate over bytes - Nature nature.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • A new Nature paper retrofits subword-based LLMs into byte-level models using 49.1 billion tokens of extra training, which the authors call under 1% of typical pretraining.
  • The byteified Bolmo 7B reports a +16.5% absolute STEM-task gain over BLT 7B, a byte-level transformer trained from random initialization.
  • The two-stage conversion procedure is applied to Olmo 3 7B, OLMo 2 1B, Qwen3 8B Base and Llama 3 8B, producing Bolmo, Bwen and Blama variants.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 4d ago

Our paper on retrofitting language models to operate over bytes – the approach behind Bolmo – has been accepted to Nature! 🎉 We’re also releasing new checkpoints that extend our method from Olmo to Qwen & Llama. 🧵 buff.ly/l5ILoNT

Retrofitting language models to operate over bytes - Nature nature.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • The paper converts existing subword LLMs into byte-level variants: Bolmo 7B, Bolmo 1B, Bwen 8B, Blama 8B, for under 1% of pretraining cost.
  • Bolmo 7B shows a +16.5% absolute improvement in STEM tasks over the BLT 7B byte-level baseline.
  • The two-stage procedure uses 9.8B tokens in stage 1 and 39.3B in stage 2, plus roughly 75M tokens of synthetic character data.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 4d ago

Our paper on retrofitting language models to operate over bytes – the approach behind Bolmo – has been accepted to Nature! 🎉 We’re also releasing new checkpoints that extend our method from Olmo to Qwen & Llama. 🧵 buff.ly/l5ILoNT

Retrofitting language models to operate over bytes - Nature nature.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Byteification converts a trained subword LLM into a byte-level model using less than 1% of a typical pretraining run, about 49.1B tokens.
  • Bolmo 7B, built from Olmo 3, shows a +16.5% absolute improvement on STEM tasks over the earlier byte-level BLT 7B baseline.
  • The team released byteified versions of Olmo 3, OLMo 2, Qwen3 and Llama 3 as Bolmo 7B, Bolmo 1B, Bwen 8B and Blama 8B.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 4d ago

Our paper on retrofitting language models to operate over bytes – the approach behind Bolmo – has been accepted to Nature! 🎉 We’re also releasing new checkpoints that extend our method from Olmo to Qwen & Llama. 🧵 buff.ly/l5ILoNT

Retrofitting language models to operate over bytes - Nature nature.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Byteification converts existing subword LLMs into byte-level models with 49.1B tokens of training, under 1% of a normal pretraining run.
  • Authors release Bolmo 7B and 1B from OLMo, plus Bwen 8B from Qwen 3 8B and Blama 8B from Llama 3 8B.
  • Bolmo 7B shows a +16.5% absolute improvement on STEM over the prior BLT 7B byte-level system.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 4d ago

Our fully open releases give researchers the data, code, checkpoints, and methods they need to inspect claims, reproduce findings, and advance new science. Read more about why that’s so important to us. ⬇️ allenai.org/blog/who-get...

Who gets to understand AI? | Ai2 allenai.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Ai2 argues meaningful AI transparency requires not just open weights but training data, code, methods, checkpoints, evaluations, and documentation.
  • Post cites three studies enabled by open Olmo releases, covering clinical demographic bias, benchmark inflation, and how models reason about drug names.
  • Without that access, Ai2 warns, technical direction of the field risks becoming concentrated inside a small number of companies.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 4 ↻ 1 ↩ 0 · 2 from the directory shared this · 79d ago

Recent commentary

LLMs are no longer created w/ human data alone. They rely on other models to generate & filter data, evaluate outputs, & guide dev work. So what is a modern LLM built on? Olmo 3 → 89 model + 183 dataset dependencies; Nemotron 3 → 273 + 560 We made ModSleuth to trace this. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 53 ↻ 11 ↩ 1 · 122d ago

Today we're introducing a preview of TutorMoments, a framework that measures whether AI tutors can make one of the hardest calls in teaching: when to step in and help a student, & when to hold back and let them do the heavy thinking. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 51 ↻ 6 ↩ 2 · 65d ago

We built SciArena to test how well AI models handle scientific literature questions, as judged by researchers. It's retiring July 15, and the results are in: ~1,700 users cast ~3,900 votes. Here's what they told us. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 5 ↩ 2 · 88d ago

AI image generators don't "draw"—they follow a compass: the score function, which points toward more probable images. The same compass drives Bayesian sampling and plasma physics. We built DiScoFormer to estimate the score far better when data gets complex. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 14 ↻ 1 ↩ 2 · 103d ago

When a model writes, where do its words come from? Are they new, or do they match exactly with language it saw in training? An AI-writing detector can't tell you. @tuhinchakr.bsky.social's group at Stony Brook has been dissecting AI-generated prose with our infini-gram engine. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 13 ↻ 1 ↩ 1 · 71d ago

Two updates to Asta, our ecosystem of AI agents for science: a one-click handoff from AutoDiscovery to Asta’s data analysis tools, & paper search that evaluates its own results + searches again when they fall short. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 10 ↻ 2 ↩ 1 · 82d ago

Building an LLM means evaluating it over & over as it changes. Tweak a hyperparameter or scale the model up, & every new checkpoint sends you back through the same benchmarking loop. We're releasing olmo-eval, a workbench built for this kind of iterative model development. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 8 ↻ 3 ↩ 1 · 121d ago

We're heading to #COLM2026 next week! Four days of workshops, posters, & talks on our latest fully open AI research, from Olmo Hybrid to evals for AI-assisted scientific writing. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 1 ↩ 1 · 8d ago

As a nonprofit research institute dedicated to advancing open science, we're encouraged to see growing support for open models across the AI ecosystem. We believe the evidence behind advanced AI systems shouldn’t be locked up in a few hands.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 1 ↩ 1 · 79d ago

What does it actually take to build cutting-edge AI systems? On July 30 during #SeattleTechWeek, the researchers behind Ai2's open models sit down to talk through the deep technical work behind them. 🧵

View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 86d ago

In Ai2's orbit

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