PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Ali Farhadi

Also known as A. Farhadi

Ali Farhadi is a computer vision researcher and AI lab leader whose work spans real-time object detection, visual-language systems, and open models. After earning a PhD at Illinois in 2011 and completing a postdoctoral year at Carnegie Mellon, he joined the University of Washington faculty in 2012. He coauthored YOLO and co-founded Xnor.ai, which Apple acquired in 2020. At Ai2, he led the institute as CEO and coauthored the open Molmo and Olmo 3 model reports. In 2026, YOLO received the Longuet-Higgins Prize, and as of October 2026 Farhadi is Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI and leads its Superintelligence team.

Works
245
Citations
100,677
h-index
63

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Ali Farhadi

Timeline

  1. 2011–2012

    Illinois PhD and UW appointment

    After earning a PhD at Illinois in 2011 and completing a Carnegie Mellon postdoctoral year, he joins the University of Washington CSE faculty in 2012.

  2. 2016

    The YOLO detector

    With Joseph Redmon, Santosh Divvala, and Ross Girshick, he publishes the CVPR 2016 paper YOLO, a single-network object detector that processes images in real time.

  3. 2017

    A Sloan fellowship

    The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation names him a 2017 Sloan Research Fellow for his computer-science work.

  4. 2017–2020

    Starting Xnor.ai

    At Ai2, he co-founds Xnor.ai in 2017 to run efficient machine-learning algorithms on low-power devices; Apple acquires the startup in 2020.

  5. January 2024

    Ai2 chief executive

    As Ai2 CEO, he describes the January 2024 National AI Research Resource pilot as a major step toward opening research tools to the community.

  6. September 2024

    Molmo and PixMo

    In 2024, he coauthors Molmo and PixMo, a family of open vision-language models and datasets with 2D pointing data for image questions.

  7. December 2025

    Olmo 3

    He coauthors Olmo 3 in 2025, a fully open 7B and 32B language-model family for reasoning, coding, and instruction following.

  8. As of October 2026

    Leading Microsoft Superintelligence

    In 2026, the CVPR 2016 YOLO paper receives the Longuet-Higgins Prize. As of October 2026, Farhadi is Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI and heads its Superintelligence team.

Sources and credits

Photo: TechCrunch, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 2.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Ali Farhadi joins UW CSE news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. UW CSE professor Ali Farhadi and Ph.D. alum Jon Froehlich win Sloan Research Fellowships news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Apple buys edge-based AI startup Xnor.ai for a reported $200M techcrunch.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Ai2 is a founding partner of National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) to advance industry wide AI research and collaboration allenai.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. Olmo 3 arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. IEEE Computer Society Celebrates 2026 Technical Community on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TCPAMI) Awardees computer.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. Microsoft’s latest AI hire frees Mustafa Suleyman to chase superintelligence and build in-house AI models windowscentral.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  10. Microsoft et l’autosuffisance en IA : ce que révèle la stratégie d’Ali Farhadi | Calipia : le blog blog.calipia.com. Checked 14 October 2026.