PeopleofSuperintelligence

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Sam Skjonsberg

Also known as codeviking

Sam Skjonsberg is a software engineer at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) whose specialized tools and demos make AI researchers' work tangible. He coauthored the 2018 Semantic Scholar literature-graph paper and the 2021 PAWLS annotation tool for PDFs, and he was among the PRIOR team members credited with building the Iconary drawing game. By June 2022, he was a principal software engineer at Ai2. Molmo and OLMo 2 in 2024 and Olmo 3 in 2025 list him among their coauthors. He is an engineering manager at Ai2.

Works
17

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

  1. 2018

    Semantic Scholar's literature graph

    In 2018, he coauthors the paper Construction of the Literature Graph in Semantic Scholar, which describes a deployed system that organizes published scientific literature into a graph of more than 280 million nodes.

  2. 2021

    The PAWLS annotation tool

    In 2021, he coauthors PAWLS (PDF Annotation with Labels and Structure) with Mark Neumann and Zejiang Shen, an annotation tool for PDF documents that supports span-based text labels, N-ary relations and bounding boxes. The paper appears in the System Demonstrations proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2021.

  3. 2021

    The Iconary drawing game

    He is among the PRIOR team members credited with building Iconary, a Pictionary-style game in which a person teams up with the AllenAI system to draw and guess phrases. In 2021, he coauthors the Iconary paper, which trains models to play on over 55,000 games between human players.

  4. June 2022

    Principal engineer at Ai2

    In June 2022, he is a principal software engineer at Ai2, where he helps make AI researchers' work tangible through specialized tools and demos.

  5. 2024

    Molmo and OLMo 2

    In 2024, he is a coauthor of Molmo, a new family of vision-language models released with PixMo datasets, and of OLMo 2, a family of fully open language models at 7B, 13B and 32B scales.

  6. 2025

    Coauthoring Olmo 3

    In 2025, he is a coauthor of Olmo 3, a family of fully open language models at the 7B and 32B parameter scales whose release includes every stage, checkpoint, data point and dependency used to build it.

  7. As of October 2026

    Engineering manager at Ai2

    He is an engineering manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), after coauthoring Olmo 3 in 2025.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  2. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.
  3. 72% of AI researchers with top works connect into a single 2,592-person co-author groupIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We map the co-author network across 3,593 people shaping AI and 14,977 most-cited papers: 2,592 (72%) form one connected group with a median distance of 5 steps, led in 2-step reach by Yoshua Bengio (570) and in shortest-path bridging by Yoshua Bengio (6.7%).
  4. Direct Form 990 pay in the latest returns of 39 nonprofits with AI people on this site is highest at $2.1M at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) (2024)Includes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). IRS Form 990 compensation across 39 nonprofits with AI people on this site from 2012 to 2025: in the latest returns, Mozilla reports $6.1M including related-company pay (2024) and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) leads direct nonprofit pay at $2.1M (2024).

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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

  1. [1805.02262] Construction of the Literature Graph in Semantic Scholar arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. [2101.10281] PAWLS: PDF Annotation With Labels and Structure arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. PAWLS: PDF Annotation With Labels and Structure - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. About - Iconary from AI2 | Draw and Guess with AllenAI iconary.allenai.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. [2112.00800] Iconary: A Pictionary-Based Game for Testing Multimodal Communication with Drawings and Text arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. AI2 Newsletter | June 2022 allenai.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. [2409.17146] Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. [2501.00656] 2 OLMo 2 Furious arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. [2512.13961] Olmo 3 arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Sam Skjonsberg - Google Scholar scholar.google.com. Checked 20 October 2026.