DUBAI: Google is providing a research grant to advance artificial intelligence (AI) at Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).
Each grant is worth $100,000 (367,000 dirhams) and is aimed at supporting prominent researchers at KAUST working on projects focused on multilingual and multimodal machine learning, as well as the development of large-scale language models.
These efforts will be carried out within KAUST's new Center of Excellence on Generative AI.
Each faculty winner will also be assigned a sponsored Google researcher, according to a KAUST statement detailing the Google-funded AI projects.
Saudi Arabia is investing heavily in AI development, with U.S. IT firm Worldwide Technology partnering with Aramco Digital, the IT arm of state oil company Aramco, to bolster a market that is forecast to grow 42.6 percent annually to reach $3.11 billion (Dh11.4 billion) by 2030.
Aramco's venture capital fund, Prosperity7, participated in a $400 million (Dh1.4 billion) investment round in Zhipu AI, a Chinese startup specializing in generative AI, marking the first instance of foreign funding backing a Chinese effort to create a domestic competitor to US artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI.
