The United Arab Emirates Releases a Tiny But Powerful AI Model

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.”