Shift AI Podcast · 2026-07-25 · 26 min
In this episode of Shift AI, Noah Smith, Vice Provost for AI at the University of Washington and Senior Director of NLP Research at the Allen Institute for AI, joins host Boaz Ashkenazy for a wide ranging conversation on how universities are preparing for a workplace increasingly run by AI agents. Noah's path wound from a PhD at Johns Hopkins to a tenured professorship at Carnegie Mellon, until a call from UW pulled him west in 2015 to help build out its natural language processing faculty. A few years later he took on a second role leading a research team at the Allen Institute for AI, and this past November added a newly created role as UW's first Vice Provost for AI. The conversation covers how faculty across UW are experimenting with AI in the classroom, from an interactive logic textbook in the philosophy department to new AI literacy courses, and digs into OLMo, the fully open language model project Noah leads at Ai2, unpacking why releasing the weights, code, and training data together, not just an API, matters for regulated industries, universities, and anyone who wants to retrain a model rather than just prompt it.
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