Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
"Truly open breakthrough AI"
Seattle non-profit AI institute founded by Paul Allen; releases fully open robot models (MolmoAct, MolmoBot) and simulators (AI2-THOR, MolmoSpaces).
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) is a non-profit AI research institute in Seattle, founded in 2014 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It is best known for fully open language and multimodal models such as Olmo, Tulu and Molmo, the Semantic Scholar literature engine and environmental AI tools such as EarthRanger and Skylight. Robotics and embodied AI form one of its main research programs, and Ai2's practice is to publish model weights, training data, code and evaluation artifacts for everything it releases.
In robotics, Ai2 works mainly on foundation models for manipulation and navigation and on the simulation infrastructure used to train them. MolmoAct, released on 12 August 2025, was presented as the first Action Reasoning Model: built on the Molmo vision-language family, it first produces depth-aware perception tokens, then plans a trajectory as waypoints in image space, and finally decodes low-level actions for an end-effector or gripper using the robot's kinematic configuration. MolmoAct-7B was pre-trained on a curated subset of Open X-Embodiment data with 26.3 million samples on 256 NVIDIA H100 GPUs in about a day and post-trained on a new open dataset of about 10,000 household robot episodes. Ai2 reports 72.1% out-of-distribution success on SimplerEnv and an 86.6% average on LIBERO. Users can steer the model by drawing a visual trace on a phone or tablet before it acts. Its successor, MolmoAct 2, is built on Molmo 2-ER, an embodied-reasoning variant of Molmo 2, adding a dedicated action expert and adaptive depth reasoning.
Ai2 also maintains an open, simulation-first stack. AI2-THOR is an open-source platform of near photo-realistic 3D indoor environments in which agents navigate and interact with objects. ProcTHOR, Objaverse, Objaverse-XL and Holodeck generate large and varied training worlds from a library of more than 10 million 3D assets. MolmoSpaces combines more than 230,000 indoor scenes, more than 130,000 curated object assets and 42 million physics-grounded grasp annotations, and works with MuJoCo, ManiSkill, NVIDIA Isaac Lab and Isaac Sim. MolmoBot, a manipulation model suite trained entirely in simulation, is reported to transfer zero-shot to real robots for pick-and-place, articulated-object manipulation and door opening.
Further embodied-AI releases include GraspMolmo, a model for task-aware grasping from everyday language (for example holding a teapot by its handle to pour); RING, an embodiment-agnostic indoor navigation policy meant to work across different mobile robots; and the sim-to-real navigation projects SPOC, PoliFormer and FLaRe. These models and tools are used mainly by academic and industrial robotics researchers rather than sold as commercial products.
Ai2 is headquartered at 3800 Latona Ave NE, Seattle. Its board includes Jody Allen, and its scientific advisory board includes robotics researcher Wolfram Burgard.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
MolmoAct
Fully open Action Reasoning Model that plans in 3D via depth-aware perception tokens and image-space waypoints before decoding robot arm/gripper actions.
MolmoAct 2
Open foundation model for real-world robot manipulation built on Molmo 2-ER, with a dedicated action expert and adaptive depth reasoning; weights, data and evals released.
MolmoSpaces
Open embodied-AI simulation ecosystem with indoor scenes, object assets and grasp annotations, compatible with MuJoCo, ManiSkill and NVIDIA Isaac Lab/Isaac Sim.
MolmoBot
Open manipulation model suite trained entirely in simulation that transfers zero-shot to real robots for pick-and-place, articulated objects and door opening.
AI2-THOR
Open-source simulator of near photo-realistic 3D indoor environments where embodied agents navigate, interact with objects and learn; extended by ProcTHOR procedural scenes.
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Contact Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
WEBSITE
https://allenai.orgHEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2014
Primary Role
Research Institute
Company Size
-
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Grant / Non-profit
Funding Total
-
Keywords
- Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
- Ai2
- Allen Institute for AI
- MolmoAct
- action reasoning model
- vision-language-action model
- AI2-THOR
- MolmoSpaces
- MolmoBot
- sim-to-real transfer
- open-source robot model
- ProcTHOR
- GraspMolmo
- Research Institute
- Software/Algorithm
- Control & Software
- Cloud & Data
- Education & Research
- Consumer & Home
- Research Platform
