In a move that shows the growing influence of the United Arab Emirates in the global artificial intelligence race, a new research lab backed by the Persian Gulf nation said on Tuesday that it was freely sharing an A.I. model meant to compete with systems released by companies in the United States and China. ...
Now the new Emirati lab, the Institute of Foundation Models, has released its first open source model, K2 Think. The lab said the system performed on a par with the leading open source technologies from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek, according to standard benchmarks. ...
The university is led by Dr. Xing, a Chinese-born American researcher who was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. He and the Emirati university recently opened satellite offices in Paris and Silicon Valley. ...
Like DeepSeek, which demonstrated its success early this year, the lab aims to show that powerful technologies can be built without access to the enormous amounts of computer hardware amassed by the likes of OpenAI and Google. ...
K2 Think is a “reasoning model” that can spend time “thinking” through complex problems before settling on an answer. ...
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/technology/uae-emirates-ai-open-source.html