Ali Farhadi named CEO of the Allen Institute for AI

Background

The Allen Institute for AI, known as Ai2, is an artificial intelligence research institute. Its chief executive for the previous nine years had been Oren Etzioni, who stepped down on 30 September 2022.^[1] After his departure the institute was led on an interim basis by Peter Clark while a successor was sought.^[1]

A chief executive of a research institute is the person who sets its research agenda, organises its research staff and speaks for the organisation in public, so the choice of who fills the job is one way of reading what an institute intends to prioritise.

The announcement

On 20 June 2023, Ai2 named Ali Farhadi as its CEO, effective 31 July 2023.^[1] He succeeded Etzioni.^[1] The institute described the appointment as Farhadi rejoining it, and presented him as its second CEO.^[3]

Who Farhadi is

At the time of the announcement, Farhadi was a professor at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School.^[2] Immediately before the appointment, he had led Apple's machine learning initiatives.^[3] His profile therefore combined two settings that AI research institutes often draw on: a university appointment and experience running machine learning work inside a large technology company.

What he said

In Ai2's own announcement of the appointment, Farhadi said he could not think of a better time to return to Ai2 as CEO, and argued that the world needs open and transparent AI research grounded in science.^[4] The statement framed the job less around a particular product or result than around how AI research should be carried out — openly, transparently and on a scientific footing.

Why it matters

The appointment closed a stretch in which the institute had been run by an interim chief executive, and it put a researcher with both academic and industry experience at the head of an organisation whose stated emphasis is open research.^[1][3][4] The timing and the wording of the announcement are the parts most worth keeping: a leadership change at a research institute is also a statement about the direction the institution means to take, and here that direction was described in terms of openness and scientific rigour rather than in terms of products.