PeopleofSuperintelligence

Builder

Aaron Sarnat

Aaron Sarnat is an AI project collaborator whose work connects interactive interfaces and games with multimodal and language model systems. In 2007, he worked as a developer on a Power Climber Wind website project; in 2017, he coauthored a paper on linguistic visualization. He coauthored research on Iconary, the open Molmo vision-language model family, and OLMoTrace, a system for tracing model outputs to training data. Since 2025, he is part of Ai2’s OLMoTrace team.

Works
9
Citations
78
h-index
3

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2007

    A Seattle web project

    In 2007, he works as the developer on a Seattle brand identity and website project for Power Climber Wind.

  2. 2017

    Visualizing linguistic structure

    In 2017, he coauthors a visualization library and web interface for exploring parse trees and forests of parses.

  3. 2019

    Creating Iconary

    In 2019, AI2’s PRIOR group includes him among the creators of Iconary, an online game where people draw and guess phrases with an AI player.

  4. 2021

    The Iconary study

    In 2021, he coauthors the Iconary paper on models trained with more than 55,000 games between human players.

  5. 2024

    Molmo and PixMo

    In 2024, he coauthors the Molmo and PixMo paper, which introduces Molmo as an open family of vision-language models and describes datasets collected without external vision-language models.

  6. Since 2025

    OLMoTrace at Ai2

    Since 2025, he is part of Ai2’s OLMoTrace team; the system traces language model outputs to matching text in training data.

A language model matched the links in this timeline to people, organizations and papers (provisional, model-judged).

Most-cited works

  1. Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models2025 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 66 citationsWith Ali Farhadi, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Chris Callison-Burch, Eli VanderBilt, Luca Weihs and Nathan Lambert
  2. Iconary: A Pictionary-Based Game for Testing Multimodal Communication with Drawings and Text2021 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) · 6 citationsWith Ali Farhadi, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Jordi Salvador and Oren Etzioni
  3. OLMoTrace: Tracing Language Model Outputs Back to Trillions of Training Tokens2025 · Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) · 6 citationsWith Ali Farhadi, Noah Smith and Pang Wei Koh
  4. Interactive Visualization for Linguistic Structure2017 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations (EMNLP) · 1 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 33%Includes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 33% in 2020–2024.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  3. 44% of AI career moves go from one university to anotherIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate how 11,906 AI career moves link universities, companies, labs and government research centers, with net flows and the most common paths.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1962 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Aaron Sarnat yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Design Hovie Studios Inc - Brand Identity - Web Design - Power Climber Wind hovie.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. Interactive Visualization for Linguistic Structure - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. AI2 Creates World’s First AI to Play a Pictionary-like Game psychologytoday.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. Iconary: A Pictionary-Based Game for Testing Multimodal Communication with Drawings and Text arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. OLMoTrace: Tracing Language Model Outputs Back to Trillions of Training Tokens arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. Allen School researchers recognized at ACL 2025 for shaping the present and future of natural language processing news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.