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

An world lab successful nan United Arab Emirates coming launched an artificial intelligence world exemplary and agent, 2 ample connection models (LLMs), and a new investigation halfway successful Silicon Valley arsenic nan state ramps up its finance successful nan field.

The UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) revealed an AI world exemplary called PAN, which tin beryllium utilized to build physically realistic simulations for testing and honing nan capacity of AI agents.

Eric Xing, president and professor of MBZUAI and a starring AI researcher, revealed nan models and laboratory astatine nan Computer History Museum successful Mountain View, California, today. The UAE has made large investments successful AI successful caller years nether nan guidance of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, nan nation’s tech-savvy nationalist information advisor and younger relative of president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Xing says nan UAE’s caller halfway successful Sunnyvale, California, will thief nan federation pat into nan world’s astir concentrated root of AI knowledge and talent. “We're creating pathways for knowledge speech pinch starring institutions and accessing a talent excavation that understands really to standard investigation into real-world applications,” Xing said successful an announcement.

MBZUAI coming besides revealed ​​PAN-Agent, an experimental AI supplier trained to execute reasoning tasks wrong nan PAN world model. MBZAUI says AI researchers will beryllium capable to usage PAN to trial agents successful simulated real-world scenarios, including self-driving cars connected virtual roads.

A objection astatine today’s arena showed PAN being utilized to simulate self-driving cars navigating engaged roads, drones flying done unfamiliar spaces, and robots operating wrong home environments.

Many AI researchers judge that “world models” for illustration PAN will beryllium important to building much precocious AI systems, including virtual assistants and robots tin of moving successful unfamiliar environments. Earlier this week, Google’s AI lead, Demis Hassabis, stressed nan value of world modeling to his company’s AI plans.

Besides nan caller world model, MBZUAI announced 2 caller ample connection models (LLMs) astatine today’s event. K2, a 65-billion parameter exemplary optimized for reasoning tasks, was trained connected 80 A100 chips utilizing Nvidia’s DGX Cloud, developed utilizing 35 percent little compute than Meta’s Llama 2 astatine nan aforesaid size, Xing says. MBZUAI besides revealed Jais, which it says is nan world’s astir precocious Arabic-language LLM.

President Donald Trump traveled to nan Middle East this period to agent deals involving US companies and Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar.

Deals involving US tech giants, including Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Qualcomm, could thief propel a roar for nan region’s fledgling AI industry by providing important AI chips and information halfway capacity. The deals are besides strategically important for nan US authorities because they committedness to grow US technological power up of cardinal rival China.

Trump said successful Abu Dhabi this period that respective unnamed US companies would activity pinch nan UAE to build nan largest AI information halfway cluster extracurricular of America. The woody will impact an statement designed to forestall nan spot aliases compute powerfulness being utilized by China.