The United Arab Emirates has released a new artificial intelligence system that it says can outperform leading industry models in a move that highlights both the country’s global ambitions and its intensifying competition with Saudi Arabia to lead the Middle East’s AI race.

On Sept. 9, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and state-backed tech conglomerate G42 launched K2 Think, an open-source reasoning model designed to speedily and efficiently tackle math and logic problems.

Unlike sprawling language models with hundreds of billions of parameters — essentially the number of variables or values that the model learns and adjusts to during training — K2 Think is relatively lean at 32 billion parameters. For comparison, China’s DeepSeek R-1 reasoning model runs on more than 600 billion parameters.

Details: K2 Think isn't a full large language model built to underpin a chatbot, but a targeted reasoning engine built to improve accuracy on complex tasks. It runs on hardware from US chip startup Cerberas, a challenger to Nvidia.