The United Arab Emirates has entered the global artificial intelligence race with the launch of K2 Think, a low-cost reasoning model developed by the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi.

The new model, unveiled on Tuesday, is being positioned as a rival to China’s DeepSeek and the United States’ OpenAI, despite being smaller in scale. Researchers say its performance in reasoning tasks is comparable to that of its much larger and more resource-intensive competitors.

In January, China’s DeepSeek gained international attention after claiming it had matched OpenAI’s breakthroughs in reasoning using only a fraction of the cost and energy. Now, the UAE is hoping to replicate that success, further diversifying the global AI landscape.

K2 Think was built on Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 large language model and runs on advanced hardware from U.S. AI chipmaker Cerebras. According to MBZUAI, the system is capable of generating 2,000 tokens per second—equivalent to about 1,500 words—making it one of the fastest reasoning systems available.

“What was special about our model is we treat it more like a system than just a model,” said Hector Liu, director of MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models, in an interview with CNBC. “Unlike a regular open-source model where we can just release the model, we actually deploy it and see how we can improve it over time.”

The university emphasized that K2 Think employs long chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning to enhance logical reasoning, followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to boost accuracy on complex problems.

Like DeepSeek’s R1 model, K2 Think is also open source, with its training data and model weights freely available. MBZUAI said this level of transparency will allow researchers worldwide to study, reproduce, and expand upon the system.

“K2 Think is a defining moment for AI in the UAE,” MBZUAI said in a statement. “It reflects how open innovation and close public–private partnerships can position Abu Dhabi as a global leader in AI, demonstrating that the future of reasoning will be shaped not only by size, but by ingenuity and collaboration.”

While the United States and China continue to dominate the AI sector, the UAE’s entry into the field signals its ambition to carve out a leading role in shaping the future of advanced AI reasoning systems. (ILKHA)