Abu Dhabi: The United Arab Emirates has launched K2 Think, a new low-cost AI reasoning model aimed at competing with global leaders such as OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek, as part of its broader push for AI sovereignty.
Developed by the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in partnership with domestic AI company G42, which is backed by Microsoft, K2 Think is built on Alibaba’s open-source Qwen 2.5 model and runs on infrastructure from AI chipmaker Cerebras, CNBC reported.
The model contains 32 billion parameters, far smaller than DeepSeek’s R1 with 671 billion, but researchers claim it can deliver comparable reasoning performance on significantly fewer resources. Parameter count typically reflects the scale and learning capacity of a large language model (LLM).
Hector Liu, director of MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models, said the UAE’s approach was unique. “What was special about our model is we treated it more like a system than just a model. So, unlike a regular open-source model where we can just release the model, we actually deploy the model and see how we can improve the model over time,” he noted.
According to MBZUAI’s managing director Richard Morton, K2 Think is designed to accelerate scientific research. “The fact is that the fundamental reasoning of the human brain is the cornerstone of all the thinking process. With this particular application, instead of taking 1,000, 2,000 human beings five years to think through a particular question, or go through a particular set of clinical trials or something like that, this vastly condenses that period,” he said.
Though based on Alibaba’s core technology, K2 Think has been further optimized using techniques such as chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning and test-time scaling to enhance reasoning ability while keeping computing costs low.
It was tested on benchmarks covering maths, coding and science, including AIME24, AIME25, HMMT25, OMNI-Math-HARD, LiveCodeBenchv5 and GPQA-Diamond. Researchers said its results were on par with cutting-edge reasoning models from OpenAI and DeepSeek despite its smaller size.
With this launch, the UAE is seeking to position itself as a serious challenger in what has largely been seen as a US-China dominated race for artificial intelligence supremacy. Other nations, including India, are also stepping up efforts to secure AI independence.