Microsoft hires former Ai2 CEO Ali Farhadi and key researchers for Suleyman’s AI team – GeekWire

by Todd Bishop on Mar 23, 2026 at 3:32 pm March 24, 2026 at 10:27 am 

 
 
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 Ali Farhadi speaks at the Tech Alliance State of Technology annual luncheon in Seattle, May 2024. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) 

 Microsoft is hiring a group of top AI researchers from the Seattle-based Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington, including former Ai2 CEO Ali Farhadi, GeekWire has learned.

 Farhadi, Hanna Hajishirzi, and Ranjay Krishna are expected to join Mustafa Suleyman’s organization at Microsoft while retaining their faculty positions at the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. Also joining is Sophie Lebrecht, the former Ai2 chief operating officer.

 The move follows Farhadi’s departure from Ai2 , announced March 12. Farhadi had led the Seattle-based nonprofit research institute for more than two and a half years.

 In a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday, Farhadi wrote that he was excited to join Microsoft.

 “I believe this is an opportunity to work on something that goes beyond what a frontier lab can do alone: exploring what becomes possible when AI is built from within a frontier ecosystem,” he said.

 Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, narrowed his focus last week from overseeing consumer-oriented Copilot products to leading Microsoft’s Superintelligence team. 

 The hires come as Microsoft works to reduce its dependence on OpenAI for frontier AI models, competing against Amazon, Google, and others. Suleyman’s Superintelligence team, formed in November, is part of a broader push to further develop advanced foundation models. 

 Microsoft has already hired researchers from Google DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and the addition of the Ai2 and UW group would bring deep expertise in open-source model development and training efficiency — where Ai2 has punched well above its weight.

 Backing from NSF and Nvidia

 The exits represent a notable collective loss for Ai2, which was founded in 2014 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Hajishirzi is a co-lead of the OLMo open-source language model project and a co-principal investigator on a $152 million, five-year initiative backed by the National Science Foundation and Nvidia to build open AI models for scientific research.

 She represented Ai2 in multiple sessions last week at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose, including a panel on the future of open models alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

 Krishna has led the development of Ai2’s Molmo multimodal models, among other projects. He also presented at the Nvidia conference last week on behalf of the institute.

 Farhadi, a computer vision specialist, co-founded Ai2 spinout Xnor.ai, which Apple acquired in 2020 for an estimated $200 million. He led machine learning efforts at Apple before returning to lead Ai2 as CEO in July 2023.

 Ai2 interim CEO Peter Clark acknowledged the departures in a statement, saying the institute remains com

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