UAE Enters Global AI Race with Powerful, Efficient Reasoning Model

The United Arab Emirates Releases a Tiny But Powerful AI Model

K2 Think compares well with reasoning models from OpenAI and DeepSeek but is smaller and more efficient, say researchers based in Abu Dhabi. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has released an open source model that performs advanced reasoning as well as the best offerings from both the United States and China -- one of the strongest signs so far that the nation's big investments in artificial intelligence are starting to pay off. The new model, K2 Think, comes from researchers at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) located in UAE's capital Abu Dhabi. The model -- one of the first so-called "sovereign" AI models that incorporates technical advances needed for reasoning -- is being made available for free by G42, an Emirati tech conglomerate backed by Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth funds. G42 is running the model on a cluster of Cerberas chips, an alternative to Nvidia's hardware. K2 Thinking is one of the UAE's contributions to the global race to demonstrate prowess in a technology widely expected to have huge economic and geopolitical implications. The United States and China are considered the dominant players in this contest. But many smaller nations, especially ones with considerable wealth to invest, are also racing to develop their own "sovereign" AI models. K2 Think is relatively modest in size, with 32 billion parameters. It is not a complete large language model but rather a model specialized for reasoning, capable of answering complex questions through a simulated kind of deliberation rather than quickly synthesizing information to provide an output. For such tasks, the researchers say it performs on par with reasoning models from OpenAI and DeepSeek, which have more than 200 billion parameters. "This is a technical innovation or, in my opinion, a disruption," Eric Xing, MBZUAI's president and lead AI researcher told WIRED ahead of today's announcement. Xing says the model demonstrates a particularly effective combination of a number of recent technical innovations. These include fine tuning on long strings of simulated reasoning; an agentic planning process that breaks problems down in different ways; and reinforcement learning that trains the model to reach verifiably correct answers. Other innovations allow the model to be served very efficiently on Cerebras chips. "How to make a smaller model function as well as a more powerful one -- that's a lesson to learn, if other people want to learn from us," Xing said. Xing adds that K2 Think was developed using several thousands of GPUs (he declined to give a precise number), and the final training run involved 200-300 chips. The plan is to incorporate K2 Think into a full LLM in the coming months. MBZUAI has open sourced the model and published a technical report that details how different innovations were combined to create it. Other nations in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, are also investing heavily in AI infrastructure and research. President Donald Trump traveled to the region in May to announce numerous AI deals involving US tech companies. The UAE's leadership has invested billions to establish itself as a strategically important research hub. The country has already revealed some cutting edge AI research and established an outpost in Silicon Valley. The UAE has lessened its ties to China in return for access to the US silicon needed to train frontier models. Peng Xiao, CEO of G42, and a MBZUAI board member, said in a statement: "By proving that smaller, more resourceful models can rival the largest systems, this achievement shows how Abu Dhabi is shaping the next wave of global innovation."

Abu Dhabi launches low-cost AI reasoning model in challenge to OpenAI, DeepSeek

"What we're discovering is that you can do a lot more with less," Richard Morton, managing director for the UAE's AI-focused university MBZUAI, told CNBC. A new challenger in the global artificial intelligence race has entered the ring. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), an AI-focused research university established by the United Arab Emirates, announced on Tuesday the release of a new, low-cost reasoning model to rival OpenAI and DeepSeek. It comes after DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, earlier this year shocked the world with the release of a reasoning model called R1 which it said could outperform OpenAI but with far less training costs. At just 32 billion parameters, MBZUAI's model, dubbed K2 Think, is much smaller than competing systems from OpenAI and DeepSeek. It was built on top of Alibaba's open-source Qwen 2.5 model and is run and tested on hardware provided by AI chipmaker Cerebas. For context, DeepSeek's R1 has a total of 671 billion parameters, which is essentially another term for the variables that an AI language model learns to understand and generate language. OpenAI doesn't disclose the parameter counts of its AI models.

United Arab Emirates Joins U.S. and China in Giving Away A.I. Technology

Cade Metz has covered artificial intelligence for more than 15 years. In a move that shows the growing influence of the United Arab Emirates in the global artificial intelligence race, a new research lab backed by the Persian Gulf nation said on Tuesday that it was freely sharing an A.I. model meant to compete with systems released by companies in the United States and China. Over the past year, many Chinese companies have aggressively shared their technologies through a process called open source, hoping to undercut leading U.S. companies like OpenAI and Google. Last month, OpenAI freely shared two of its own models in an effort to level the playing field and ensure that the world's software developers and businesses continued to use its technology. Now the new Emirati lab, the Institute of Foundation Models, has released its first open source model, K2 Think. The lab said the system performed on a par with the leading open source technologies from OpenAI and China's DeepSeek, according to standard benchmarks. The Emirates is among several nations pouring billions of dollars into computer data centers and research to compete with leading nations like the United States and China in artificial intelligence. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Singapore are embracing the idea that the A.I. is so important, each should have its own version of the technology. "A.I. will not be monopolized by just a few countries," said Eric Xing, president of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, which operates the Emirates' new lab. "We are trying to build a foundation for research and development and sovereignty of intellectual creativity in this country." The new open source release from the Emirates is likely to divide opinion in Washington. The lab built its technology using data centers operated by G42, an Emirati firm that recently received more than 10,000 computer chips from the United States as part of a deal between the Trump administration and the Emirates. The Trump administration officials who drove the deal, including David Sacks, the White House A.I. czar, have championed the agreement as a way of persuading gulf states to use and promote American A.I. technology rather than turning to China. But as the release of the K2 Think model shows, the Emiratis are also competing with their American counterparts. "This is what every technology challenger does: They open source so they can level the playing field," said Pablo Chavez, an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, a think tank, who has written about A.I. infrastructure. The Institute of Foundation Models was founded in March by the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a six-year-old university. The university is part of an Emirati strategy called Artificial Intelligence 2031, which seeks to "position the country as a global A.I. leader." The university is led by Dr. Xing, a Chinese-born American researcher who was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. He and the Emirati university recently opened satellite offices in Paris and Silicon Valley. Dr. Xing said in an interview that the lab had built its new model with only about 2,000 specialized computer chips, far fewer than the hundreds of thousands available to leading companies in the United States. Like DeepSeek, which demonstrated its success early this year, the lab aims to show that powerful technologies can be built without access to the enormous amounts of computer hardware amassed by the likes of OpenAI and Google. "Going big, going expensive, may work, but it may not be the only way," Dr. Xing said. "We can use limited resources to make things work." K2 Think is designed for areas like math, computer coding and science research; it is not intended to be a general-purpose chatbot like ChatGPT. K2 Think is a "reasoning model" that can spend time "thinking" through complex problems before settling on an answer. Even as the Emirates works to build powerful A.I. with fewer resources, its resources are expanding, with U.S. chipmakers like Nvidia and the start-up Cerebras supplying the country with hardware. At the same time, U.S. companies are turning to the Emirates and other Middle Eastern countries for funding and other resources. In May, OpenAI unveiled plans to build a massive computing complex in the Emirates in a joint venture with G42, the software giant Oracle, the chipmaker Nvidia and others. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims). G42 is also expected to contribute money to the construction of OpenAI data centers in the United States. For every dollar that the firm and its partners invest in the Emirates, they will invest an equivalent amount in the U.S. data centers, according to OpenAI. The size of these planned data centers suggests that G42 will invest tens of billions of dollars in each country, as the Emirates expands its influence in the A.I. field and diversifies its investments beyond oil and gas. Last week, the Qatar Investment Authority invested in Anthropic, another prominent A.I. start-up in the United States, as part of a funding round that brought $13 billion into the company. The Qatari wealth fund had already invested in Elon Musk's artificial intelligence start-up, xAI.