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Title: UAE Lab Releases Open-Source Model to Rival China's DeepSeek

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/13/1734225/u...

"The United Arab Emirates wants to compete with the U.S. and China in AI,"
writes Gizmodo, "and a new open source model may be its strongest contender
yet. "An Emirati AI lab called the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM)
released K2 Think on Tuesday, a model that researchers say rivals OpenAI's
ChatGPT and China's DeepSeek in standard benchmark tests." "With just 32
billion parameters, it outperforms flagship reasoning models that are 20x
larger," the lab wrote in a press release on Tuesday. DeepSeek's R1 has 671
billion parameters, though only 37 billion are active. Meta's latest Llama 4
models range from 17 billion to 288 billion active parameters. OpenAI doesn't
share parameter information. OpenAI doesn't share parameter information.
Researchers also claim that K2 Think leads "all open-source models in math
performance" across several benchmarks. The model is intended to be more
focused on math, coding, and scientific research than most other AI chatbots.
The Emirati lab's selling point for the model is similar to DeepSeek's
strategy that disrupted the AI market earlier this year: optimized efficiency
that will have better or the same computing power at a lower cost... The lab
is also aiming to be transparent in everything, "open-sourcing not just
models but entire development processes" that provide "researchers with
complete materials including training code, datasets, and model checkpoints,"
IFM said in a press release from May. The UAE and other Arab countries are
investing in AI to try reducing their economic dependence on fossil fuels,
the article points out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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