UAE's MBZUAI Unveils Frontier AI Projects and Silicon Valley Research Center

A United Arab Emirates Lab Announces Frontier AI Projects -- and a New Outpost in Silicon Valley

As Donald Trump pens deals in the Middle East, the gulf nation opens a research lab in San Francisco. A United Arab Emirates (UAE) academic lab today launched an artificial intelligence world model and agent, two large language models (LLMs) and a new research center in Silicon Valley as it ramps up its investment in the cutting-edge field. The UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) revealed an AI world model called PAN, which can be used to build physically realistic simulations for testing and honing the performance of AI agents. Eric Xing, President and Professor of MBZUAI and a leading AI researcher, revealed the models and lab at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California today. Xing says the UAE's new center in Sunnyvale, California, will help the nation tap into the world's most concentrated source of AI knowledge and talent. "We're creating pathways for knowledge exchange with leading institutions and accessing a talent pool that understands how to scale research into real-world applications," Xing said in an announcement. MBZUAI today also revealed PAN-Agent, an experimental AI agent trained to perform reasoning tasks within the PAN world model. MBZAUI says AI researchers will be able to use PAN to test agents in simulated real-world scenarios, including self-driving cars on virtual roads. A demonstration at today's event showed PAN being used to simulate self-driving cars navigating busy roads, drones flying through unfamiliar species, and robots operating within domestic environments. Many AI researchers believe that "world models" like PAN will be crucial to building more advanced AI systems, including virtual assistants and robots capable of working in unfamiliar environments. Earlier this week, Google's AI lead, Demis Hassabis, stressed the importance of world modeling to his company's AI plans. Besides the new world model, MBZUAI announced two new large language models (LLMs) at today's event. K2, a 65-billion parameter model optimized for reasoning tasks, was trained on 80 A100 chips using NVIDIA's DGX Cloud, developed using 35 percent less compute than Meta's Llama 2 at the same size, Xing says. MBZUAI also revealed Jais, which it says is the world's most advanced Arabic-language LLM. President Donald Trump traveled to the Middle East this month to broker deals involving US companies and Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar. Deals involving US tech giants, including Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Qualcomm, could help propel a boom for the region's fledgling AI industry by providing crucial AI chips and datacenter capacity. The deals are also strategically important for the US government because they promise to expand US technological influence ahead of key rival China. Trump said in Abu Dhabi this month that several unnamed US companies would work with the UAE to build the largest AI datacenter cluster outside of America. The deal will involve an arrangement designed to prevent the chip or compute power being used by China.

UAE's AI University Aims to Become Stanford of the Gulf

A few weeks before Donald Trump announced plans to lift semiconductor restrictions on the United Arab Emirates, a move with the potential to supercharge the region's AI development, Eric Xing sat in his office in Abu Dhabi and discussed what the future might look like. Xing, a computer scientist who previously taught at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, is president of Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, a six-year-old institution uniquely positioned to shape the coming AI boom. During an interview with Bloomberg, Xing repeatedly mentioned his ambition of making MBZUAI the Stanford of the Gulf, pointing to the California school's role in nurturing a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship whose effects have rippled far beyond Silicon Valley.