Interview with Akari Asai - Beyond Scaling: Frontiers of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Akari Asai is a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and an incoming Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her research advances reliable and up-to-date language systems, especially retrieval-augmented and agentic language models, and applies them to high-impact settings, including scientific discovery and information access for underrepresented languages. Akari's work has been published at top-tier NLP and ML venues and in Nature, and has been recognized with multiple paper awards, the IBM Global Fellowship, and industry grants. She is a recipient of the AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award, was named to MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 and Forbes 30 Under 30 (Asia, Science), and has been featured by outlets including Forbes and MIT Technology Review.