PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Iz Beltagy

Iz Beltagy is a computer scientist whose work spans scientific language models, long documents, and open large language models. He earned a computer science PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016, coauthored SciBERT in 2019, and coauthored Longformer in 2020. At BigScience, he worked on BLOOM's architecture and training; in 2023, he became OLMo's research lead and co-founded Spiffy AI. He coauthored the OLMo report in 2024; OLMo won GeekWire's Innovation of the Year award, which he accepted for the team. Since July 2026, he is Director of AI Research at Ai2, where he returned in May 2026 to lead the Olmo Team.

Works
78

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

  1. 2016

    A computer science PhD

    He completes a PhD in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016.

  2. 2019

    SciBERT for scientific text

    In 2019, he coauthors SciBERT, a pretrained language model based on BERT for scientific text.

  3. 2020

    Longformer for long documents

    In 2020, he and his coauthors introduce Longformer, whose attention scales linearly with sequence length to process documents of thousands of tokens.

  4. 2021–2022

    Working on BLOOM's architecture

    In September 2021, he is scheduled with Julien Launay for a BigScience technical talk on Architecture and Scaling. In 2022, he coauthors a BigScience study of architecture and training choices for BLOOM's one-million-GPU-hour budget.

  5. 2023

    Leading OLMo and founding Spiffy AI

    In March 2023, he becomes Research Lead of OLMo, an Ai2 project to train truly open language models. In 2023, he co-founds Spiffy AI, a company building AI agents for digital commerce.

  6. 2024

    OLMo's open model and award

    In February 2024, he coauthors the OLMo technical report, which releases the model with open training data and training and evaluation code. In 2024, OLMo wins GeekWire's Innovation of the Year award, and he accepts it on behalf of the OLMo team.

  7. Since July 2026

    Director of AI Research at Ai2

    In May 2026, he returns to Ai2 as Research Lead of its Olmo Team and outlines planned research on new architectures, natively multimodal models, scaled pretraining, and reinforcement learning. In July 2026, he becomes Director of AI Research at Ai2.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Contributor biographies | Online Resources study.sagepub.com. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. [2004.05150] Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. INLG2021 inlg2021.github.io. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. [2210.15424] What Language Model to Train if You Have One Million GPU Hours? arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. Iz Beltagy | Research Scientist at AI2 working on NLP beltagy.net. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. Envive — venture-backed company profile | Dealroom dealroom.co. Checked 15 October 2026.
  8. [2402.00838] OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  9. Open by design: Ai2 brings fully open AI infrastructure online with NSF OMAI | Ai2 allenai.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  10. Iz Beltagy's email & phone number - Director of AI Research at Ai2 | SignalHire signalhire.com. Checked 15 October 2026.