As the Gulf’s regional competition to develop AI technology heats up, the United Arab Emirates unveiled a new Arabic language AI model on Wednesday.
The UAE, a significant oil exporter, has been investing billions of dollars in an attempt to gain access to technology by using its close ties with the US to become a worldwide player in artificial intelligence.
“An AI agreement with the UAE creates a path for it to access some of the advanced AI semiconductors from U.S. firms,” U.S. President Donald Trump stated during a visit last week, marking a significant victory for the Gulf nation.
By creating a “high-quality native (non-translated) Arabic dataset,” Falcon Arabic, created by Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), seeks to represent the entire linguistic diversity of the Arab world, according to a statement.
Additionally, it claims to equal the performance of models up to ten times its size.
“Today, being a leader in AI is about more than just scale. In the release, ATRC secretary general Faisal Al Bannai stated, “It is about making powerful tools useful, usable, and universal.”
Additionally, ATRC introduced the Falcon H1, which it said outperforms rivals Meta and Alibaba (9988.HK) and opens a new page by lowering the amount of technical know-how and processing power often needed to run sophisticated systems.
Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, which is positioning itself as a potential centre for AI activity outside of the United States, also featured a strong AI theme.
According to a statement, the kingdom established a new business earlier this month to create and oversee AI infrastructure and technologies. The company also hopes to provide one of the most potent multimodal Arabic large language models in the world.
