A United Arab Emirates Lab Announces Frontier AI Projects—and a New Outpost in Silicon Valley

An educational lab within the United Arab Emirates in the present day launched an artificial intelligence world mannequin and agent, two giant language fashions (LLMs), and a new research center in Silicon Valley because the nation ramps up its funding within the subject.

The UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed College of Synthetic Intelligence (MBZUAI) revealed an AI world mannequin known as PAN, which can be utilized to construct bodily lifelike simulations for testing and honing the efficiency of AI brokers.

Eric Xing, president and professor of MBZUAI and a number one AI researcher, revealed the fashions and lab on the Laptop Historical past Museum in Mountain View, California, in the present day. The UAE has made big investments in AI in recent years beneath the steering of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the nation’s tech-savvy nationwide safety adviser and youthful brother of president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Xing says the UAE’s new middle in Sunnyvale, California, will assist the nation faucet into the world’s most concentrated supply of AI data and expertise. “We’re creating pathways for data trade with main establishments and accessing a expertise pool that understands how you can scale analysis into real-world functions,” Xing stated in an announcement.

MBZUAI in the present day additionally revealed ​​PAN-Agent, an experimental AI agent skilled to carry out reasoning duties inside the PAN world mannequin. MBZAUI says AI researchers will have the ability to use PAN to check brokers in simulated real-world situations, together with self-driving vehicles on digital roads.

An illustration at in the present day’s occasion confirmed PAN getting used to simulate self-driving vehicles navigating busy roads, drones flying by unfamiliar areas, and robots working inside home environments.

Many AI researchers imagine that “world fashions” like PAN might be essential to constructing extra superior AI methods, together with digital assistants and robots able to working in unfamiliar environments. Earlier this week, Google’s AI lead, Demis Hassabis, stressed the importance of world modeling to his firm’s AI plans.

In addition to the brand new world mannequin, MBZUAI introduced two new giant language fashions (LLMs) at in the present day’s occasion. K2, a 65-billion parameter mannequin optimized for reasoning duties, was skilled on 80 A100 chips utilizing Nvidia’s DGX Cloud, developed utilizing 35 p.c much less compute than Meta’s Llama 2 on the similar dimension, Xing says. MBZUAI additionally revealed Jais, which it says is the world’s most superior Arabic-language LLM.

President Donald Trump traveled to the Center East this month to dealer offers involving US firms and Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar.

Offers involving US tech giants, together with Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Qualcomm, might assist propel a boom for the region’s fledgling AI industry by offering essential AI chips and knowledge middle capability. The offers are additionally strategically vital for the US authorities as a result of they promise to develop US technological affect forward of key rival China.

Trump stated in Abu Dhabi this month that a number of unnamed US firms would work with the UAE to construct the most important AI knowledge middle cluster outdoors of America. The deal will contain an association designed to forestall the chip or compute energy being utilized by China.