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The United Arab Emirates unveiled K2 Think, an open-source AI reasoning model developed by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and released in partnership with Emirati tech firm G42. The team says the model delivers advanced step-by-step reasoning at a fraction of the size and resource cost of the largest systems, positioning Abu Dhabi as a new contender in the global AI race.
K2 Think is a specialist reasoning model, not a general large language model. Researchers describe it as relatively modest in parameter count roughly 32 billion parameters yet engineered to perform complex reasoning tasks such as multi-step math, code reasoning and agentic planning through a combination of fine-tuning, reinforcement learning and simulated chain-of-thought training. The developers say those algorithmic choices let K2 Think match the reasoning performance of much larger models from leading labs.
A key element of the launch is efficiency. G42 is running K2 Think on Cerebras hardware rather than conventional Nvidia clusters, and MBZUAI published a technical report describing how the model was trained and served to minimize compute and energy needs. The teams framed the work as an example of “sovereign” AI smaller, locally developed systems that reduce dependence on foreign compute infrastructure.
By Ruvarashe Gora
“This is a technical innovation or, in my opinion, a disruption,” MBZUAI president Eric Xing said ahead of the announcement, adding that the project shows “how Abu Dhabi is shaping the next wave of global innovation.” G42’s CEO Peng Xiao said the release demonstrates that smaller, resource-efficient models can rival much larger systems.
Chinese firms such as DeepSeek have drawn attention for building highly efficient, low-cost models and apps, reshaping assumptions about how much investment is needed to field effective AI services. Industry analysts say models optimized for inference and reasoning, rather than raw scale can open new adoption pathways for regions and companies with constrained access to the largest chips.
Abu Dhabi’s announcement also follows high-profile partnerships and investments in the emirate’s AI infrastructure, including OpenAI’s Stargate UAE deployment earlier in 2025, underscoring a strategy that combines hosting international platforms with building local capabilities. UAE institutions have publicly committed large funding packages and policy support to accelerate domestic AI research and industry.
K2 Think’s open-source release could speed adoption among researchers and regional developers who want reasoning-capable models without the expense of frontier-scale training. The MBZUAI/G42 team says they plan to fold K2 Think into a broader LLM stack in the coming months, and have published technical details for the research community. Independent evaluation and real-world deployments will determine how the model performs outside lab benchmarks.
If smaller, reasoning-focused models like K2 Think deliver robust performance while using far less compute, they can lower the cost barrier for governments, universities and startups to build AI applications from education and healthcare to industry automation without relying solely on a handful of global cloud providers. That could reshape where and how advanced AI gets built and hosted.
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