This time, a new, inexpensive AI model has taken part in the technology race from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
On Tuesday, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (Mbzuai) in Abu Dhabi announced the release of a low-cost inference model that it hopes to rival Deepseek and Openai.
In January, the AI Bubble then got a shot of air Deepseek, a Chinese-based laboratory He said he was closely following the results of Openai in the US.
The UAE model called K2 Think is small in terms of parameters, or
A machine learning model's constructive variable that controls how data is processed and predicted compared to AI competitors including DeepSeek. However, the researchers behind it say its performance is comparable to Openai and Deepseek's inference models.
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The university said in a press release that K2 is a “new class of reasoning models,” with “incorporating long-thinking monitored fine-tuning to enhance logical depth, followed by reinforcement learning that provides verifiable rewards to enhance the accuracy of hard problems.”
“What's special about our models is that we treat them like systems rather than just models,” Hector Liu, director of Mbzuai's Foundation Model Institute, told CNBC in an interview.
“So, unlike the usual open source models where you can release models, we'll actually deploy them and see how we can improve them over time.”
Mbzuai also said it was “one of the fastest and most efficient inference systems that exist.” K2 believes it can achieve 2,000 tokens per second. This is about 1,500 words.
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K2 is built on Alibaba's large-scale language model of Qwen 2.5 and runs on AI Chipmaker Cerebras hardware.
Like Deepseek's R1 model, the K2 is also open source. This means that training data and weights are generally available.
“This new level of transparency will allow the global research community to research, replicate and extend every step of how a model learns to reason,” the university says.
Global AI Race
This technology could have a major impact on the global AI race.
The United States follows China and its highest rule, while other countries are trying to make their mark with AI.
“We see K2 as a critical moment for AI in the UAE,” Mbzuai said. “It reflects how open innovation and close public partnerships can position Abu Dhabi as a global leader in AI, indicating that the future of reasoning is shaped not only by size but also by ingenuity and collaboration.”
