The Most Capable Open Source AI Model Yet Could Supercharge AI Agents

The most capable open source AI model with visual abilities yet could see more developers, researchers, and startups develop AI agents that can carry out useful chores on your computers for you. Released today by the Allen Institute for AI, the Multimodal Open Language Model, or Molmo, can interpret images as well as converse through a chat interface. “Having an open source, multimodal model means that any startup or researcher that has an idea can try to do it,” says Ofir Press, a postdoc at Princeton University who works on AI agents. Press says that the fact that Molmo is open source means that developers will be more easily able to fine-tune their agents for specific tasks, such as working with spreadsheets, by providing additional training data.