The machine learning paradigm, and deep learning methods in particular, have achieved phenomenal results in recent years. We need to leverage and extend these methods to address grand AI challenges such as the automated acquisition of common-sense knowledge, and machine reading of text. My talk will describe the ambitious research program at the Allen Institute of AI (AI2), which aims to address these challenges in collaboration with the AI community. I will describe our key projects: Aristo — which learns from textbooks and reasons over learned knowledge to answer standardized test questions, and Semantic Scholar — which aims to utilize AI methods to revolutionize the search for academic papers.