A new platform from the Allen Institute for AI promises to deliver insights into the state of the planet, in near real-time, by giving organizations without deep AI expertise the ability to monitor deforestation, assess crop health, and predict wildfire risk, among other capabilities.
OlmoEarth, announced Tuesday by the Seattle-based nonprofit AI institute, is an open, end-to-end system that uses AI to analyze current and historical satellite and sensor data.
It runs on a new family of AI models, which Ai2 says it trained on millions of Earth observations totaling roughly 10 terabytes of data. The idea is to give anyone free access to the kinds of capabilities typically restricted to proprietary systems or well-resourced AI labs.
The platform includes tools such as OlmoEarth Studio, a workspace for creating datasets and fine-tuning models, and OlmoEarth Viewer, a web app for exploring AI-generated maps.
The initiative is “making Earth AI accessible to those working on the front lines,” said Ali Farhadi, Ai2 CEO and University of Washington professor, in a press release announcing OlmoEarth.
Patrick Beukema, lead researcher on the OlmoEarth team, added that the project is meant to encourage collaboration across scientific and technical fields, helping different groups work together on shared data and tools to better understand and respond to environmental challenges.
Ai2 said early adopters of OlmoEarth are already showing the potential, using it to update global mangrove maps twice as fast with 97% accuracy, detect deforestation across the Amazon, and map vegetation dryness in Oregon to improve wildfire prediction and prevention, for example.
It’s the latest example of Ai2’s push for “true openness” in AI, extending the philosophy behind its open-weight language and multimodal models into climate science and conservation.
Geospatial analysis has long been dominated by major tech and research organizations. Platforms like Google Earth Engine and Microsoft’s Planetary Computer provide cloud access to petabytes of satellite data, but often require significant technical expertise for analysis and are not fully open-source.
Ai2 is positioning OlmoEarth as an end-to-end open alternative, providing not just data access but a complete, usable system for model fine-tuning and deployment.
At the model level, Ai2 is competing with AI-specific tools from other major labs. In its research, Ai2 contrasts OlmoEarth with Google’s AlphaEarth Foundations, noting that Google released “embeddings” rather than the open model itself. Ai2 says a fine-tuned OlmoEarth “outperformed AEF substantially,” and also did well against models from Meta, IBM, and NASA.
The OlmoEarth Viewer is available starting today, and Ai2 has released accompanying code and documentation on GitHub. The full platform, including OlmoEarth Studio, is rolling out to select partners, and Ai2 is inviting additional collaborations.
