The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) released a new generation of its flagship large language models, designed to compete more squarely with industry and academic heavyweights.
The Seattle-based nonprofit unveiled Olmo 3, a collection of open language models that it says outperforms fully open models such as Stanford’s Marin and commercial open-weight models like Meta’s Llama 3.1.
Earlier versions of Olmo were framed mainly as scientific tools for understanding how AI models are built. With Olmo 3, Ai2 is expanding its focus, positioning the models as powerful, efficient, and transparent systems suitable for real-world use, including commercial applications.
“Olmo 3 proves that openness and performance can advance together,” said Ali Farhadi, the Ai2 CEO, in a press release Thursday morning announcing the new models.
It’s part of a broader evolution in the AI world. Over the past year, increasingly powerful open models from companies and universities — including Meta, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Stanford — have started to rival the performance of proprietary systems from big tech companies.
Many of the latest open models are designed to show their reasoning step-by-step — commonly called “thinking” models — which has become a key benchmark in the field.
Ai2 is releasing Olmo 3 in multiple versions: Olmo 3 Base (the core foundation model); Olmo 3 Instruct (tuned to follow user directions); Olmo 3 Think (designed to show more explicit reasoning); and Olmo 3 RL Zero (an experimental model trained with reinforcement learning).
Open models have been gaining traction with startups and businesses that want more control over costs and data, along with clearer visibility into how the technology works.
Ai2 is going further by releasing the full “model flow” behind Olmo 3 — a set of snapshots showing how the model progressed through each stage of training. In addition, an updated OlmoTrace tool will let researchers link a model’s reasoning steps back to the specific data and training decisions that influenced them.
In terms of energy and cost efficiency, Ai2 says the new Olmo base model is 2.5 times more efficient to train than Meta’s Llama 3.1 (based on GPU-hours per token, comparing Olmo 3 Base to Meta’s 8B post-trained model). Much of this gain comes from training Olmo 3 on far fewer tokens than comparable systems, in some cases six times fewer than rival models.
Among other improvements, Ai2 says Olmo 3 can read or analyze much longer documents at once, with support for inputs up to 65,000 tokens, about the length of a short book chapter.
Founded in 2014 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Ai2 has long operated as a research-focused nonprofit, developing open-source tools and models while bigger commercial labs dominated the spotlight. The institute has made a series of moves this year to elevate its profile while preserving its mission of developing AI to solve the world’s biggest problems.
In August, Ai2 was selected by the National Science Foundation and Nvidia for a landmark $152 million initiative to build fully open multimodal AI models for scientific research, positioning the institute to serve as a key contributor to the nation’s AI backbone.
It also serves as the key technical partner for the Cancer AI Alliance, helping Fred Hutch and other top U.S. cancer centers train AI models on clinical data without exposing patient records.
Olmo 3 is available now on Hugging Face and Ai2’s model playground.
Amazon is making more moves in the auto industry with a new partnership with Ford, allowing customers to buy certified preowned vehicles from the Detroit automaker directly on Amazon.com.
Shoppers in Los Angeles, Seattle and Dallas can browse certified Ford inventory from participating dealers within a 75-mile radius, complete most paperwork online, get financing — including through Ford Credit — and schedule a pickup time at a local franchised dealership.
“This program combines the trust and quality of a Ford-certified vehicle with the familiar, convenient shopping experience of Amazon,” Ford wrote in a blog post.
The launch follows a similar deal Amazon announced in 2023 with Hyundai, though that partnership included new vehicles. Amazon announced a separate deal with Hertz Car Sales earlier this year for used cars.
The Senate’s initial agreement toward ending the longest-ever government shutdown includes provisions that would secure back pay for all federal employees, as well as reverse the Trump administration’s recent reductions in force.
Though much is still up in the air and subject to possible changes, the early steps in the process indicate that, if the Senate bill’s current language is maintained, both excepted and furloughed federal employees would receive back pay dating to Oct. 1, the day the shutdown began.
Federal employees, regardless of whether they are furloughed or excepted, have always received back pay following every past shutdown, due to one-time actions from Congress. It wasn’t until 2019 that Congress passed — and President Donald Trump signed — a law meant to ensure federal employees are compensated retroactively for all shutdowns going forward.
Questions over back pay arose once again, however, after the Office of Management and Budget released a draft legal opinion in October, suggesting that furloughed employees are not automatically ensured back pay after all.
Many lawmakers, attorneys and unions harshly criticized the White House’s opinion, calling it a clear misinterpretation of the 2019 Government Employees Fair Treatment Act.
Throughout the funding lapse, the Trump administration has shuffled funding to compensate select groups of the federal workforce, as well as military members, while hundreds of thousands of others have missed two paychecks since the shutdown began.
The Senate took the first step toward ending the shutdown on Sunday, clearing a procedural hurdle that required 60 votes to move the spending legislation forward in the appropriations process. All but eight Democrats voted against the spending measure. But an actual end to the shutdown may still be at least several days away.
The current agreement includes bipartisan bills worked out by the Senate Appropriations Committee to fund parts of government, including food aid, veterans’ programs and the legislative branch. A continuing resolution would fund most other agency appropriations until the end of January, giving lawmakers more than two months to finish the additional spending bills.
The Senate’s legislation over the weekend would also compel agencies to reverse all reduction-in-force actions that have taken place since the shutdown began. About 4,200 federal employees across government received RIF notices in mid-October, following guidance from the White House that encouraged agencies to move forward with layoffs in the event of a funding lapse.
Most, but not all, of those RIF actions are currently on hold due to a preliminary injunction granted by a district court judge last month. Federal unions are suing the Trump administration over the layoffs, alleging that they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.
The Senate’s tentative agreement would also temporarily bar the Trump administration from conducting further RIFs until late January.
Federal employee organizations and unions expressed strong support for the provisions to secure back pay for federal employees and protect against RIFs.
“These protections provide for fundamental fairness,” Marcus Hill, president of the Senior Executives Association, said Monday. “They also safeguard continuity of government operations, preserve critical talent, and stabilize and extend funding for missions and services that millions of Americans rely on daily.”
“Millions of federal employees have missed paychecks, forcing them to assume significant financial cost, risk and uncertainty,” William Shackelford, national president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE), said. “Government shutdowns — partial as they are — harm dedicated public servants and the missions and people they serve.”
The American Federation of Government Employees threw in additional support for the passage of the Shutdown Fairness Act, a Republican-led bill to pay federal employees immediately during the current government shutdown, as well as any future ones.
“While we are glad that the shutdown is coming to an end for now, we remain concerned about the growing use of government shutdowns as leverage for political gain,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said. “That’s why AFGE strongly supports the bipartisan Shutdown Fairness Act, which would pay federal workers during government shutdowns, ensuring that federal employees will never be used as political pawns again.”
The Shutdown Fairness Act failed to advance in the Senate on Friday. Democrats largely voted down the legislation on the grounds that it did not include guardrails to prevent the Trump administration from paying some federal employees and not others.
After the bill initially failed to move forward two weeks ago, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) expanded his legislation to include furloughed employees and federal contractors. The bill initially only provided immediate pay for excepted employees who continue to work during a shutdown.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The post Tentative Senate deal reaffirms back pay, reverses RIFs for federal employees first appeared on Federal News Network.
© AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib
If you still need help hooking up the barbecue pitmaster in your life, here are some last-minute holiday shopping ideas for grilling, smoking, and outdoor cooking.
The post Our Last Minute Barbecue Buyer’s Guide first appeared on Burn Blog.
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