The Future of AI is Open - How Oumi Enables that Future for Academia & Enterprises

Emmanouil Koukoumidis, Panos Achlioptas

Keywords: AI, academia, enterprise, open source

TL;DR: The fragmented open-source AI ecosystem has impeded academic innovation and industry adoption. Oumi provides the first cohesive, open platform for the full lifecycle of model development, built for research flexibility and enterprise reliability.

Abstract:

Startup Submission

Challenge: Open-weight models developed by large enterprises (Meta, Alibaba, DeepSeek) are closing the quality gap with the frontier closed models, but both the academic research and the enterprise development ecosystem for them remains fragmented and difficult to navigate.

Academic research has become increasingly complex to perform and then reproduce by others with significant effort getting spent on setting up duck taped, ad hoc ML infra as opposed to the actual research that matters. Enterprises are struggling to effectively leverage open models to develop the specialized AI they need for their domain and tasks, often retreating back to using closed AI models.

Oumi’s Solution: Oumi provides a unified, open-source platform that streamlines the entire foundation model development lifecycle—from data preparation and training to evaluation and deployment. Designed for research and production, it offers modular, reproducible pipelines, native support for all leading open model families, and seamless integration across compute environments – from laptops to cloud providers and large-scale clusters. With Oumi, researchers and enterprises gain the reliability, flexibility, and scalability they need to advance and develop with open source AI.

Beyond its technical capabilities, Oumi fosters a collaborative ecosystem by partnering with academics from over 13 leading research institutions, including MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and UC Berkeley. This collective approach aims to democratize AI development, breaking down silos and promoting transparency, reproducibility, and shared innovation.

Oumi has already enabled several industry applications and research efforts including the agentic CoALM model [Acikgoz et al, ACL’25 to appear], the HallOumi hallucination detection model and others.

Why GreeksInAI: We strongly share the event’s mission, to bridge research with practice. Oumi’s message and platform will encourage, and enable foundation model development across academia and industry, in Greece and across the diaspora.

Our team includes three Greek co-founders, a Greek founding scholar, and we are eagerly expanding our presence in Greece, building academic collaborations, and establishing a local office.

Oumi is fully open-source, built for and with the community, and driven by a collaborative vision. By participating in GreeksInAI, we hope to showcase our contributions and deepen our ties with the Greek AI community while benefiting and fostering that community.

Submission Number: 56