ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 7 Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) releases since Jan 2025, most recently BOLMO on Dec 18, 2025. Highlights include Tulu 3 405B, OLMo 3, OLMo 2 32B, olmOCR 2 7B. All 7 shipped with open weights. Every entry below has the episode segment where we covered it live, plus primary-source links and key numbers where we have them.
Allen AI's BOLMO reaches byte-level parity with tokenized models
Allen AI released BOLMO, described as the first byte-level language model to reach parity with regular tokenization-based models. The panel framed it as a research breakthrough that could eventually remove tokenizers from the LLM stack.
Allen AI adds video-input multimodal OLMO models in 4B/7B/8B sizes
Allen AI extended its OLMO family with multimodal models that accept video input, released in 4B, 7B, and 8B sizes. It continues Allen AI's fully open approach to model development alongside the BOLMO byte-level work.
OLMo 3: Allen AI's fully open 32B model with complete recipe
Allen AI released OLMo 3, a fully open 32B dense model where the dataset, training recipe, and hyperparameters are all public — not just the weights. LDJ contrasted it with open-weights-only releases from Qwen and DeepSeek, which have never published a fully open recipe.
Ai2 launches OlmoEarth foundation models and open Earth-intelligence platform
Ai2 launched OlmoEarth, a family of foundation models plus an open, end-to-end platform for fast, high-resolution Earth intelligence. It applies the lab's open-model approach to geospatial and remote-sensing data, making Earth observation workloads accessible without proprietary stacks.
Ai2 releases olmOCR 2 7B open OCR model
The Allen Institute for AI updated its open OCR line with olmOCR 2 at 7B (released as an FP8 checkpoint), landing in the same week as DeepSeek-OCR, Qwen3-VL, and Liquid's LFM2-VL. Another sign that document understanding became this week's hottest open-model category.
AllenAI ships OLMo 2 32B, a fully open GPT-4-class model
The Allen Institute for AI released OLMo 2 32B, its biggest fully open model yet, with weights, code, and dataset all published under Apache 2.0. Announced by Nathan Lambert as a last-second addition, it reportedly beats GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o mini as well as leading open-weight models like Qwen and Mistral at its size.
Allen Institute releases Tulu 3 405B open post-trained model
The Allen Institute for AI scaled its fully open Tulu 3 post-training recipe to a 405B-parameter model based on Llama 3.1 405B. It demonstrates that Ai2's open RLVR post-training pipeline works at frontier scale, with weights and recipe released openly.
Never miss a Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) launch — we cover every release live, every Thursday.