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

An academic lab in the United Arab Emirates today launched an artificial intelligence world model and agent, two large language models (LLMs), and a new research center in Silicon Valley as the country ramps up its investment in the field.

The UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) revealed an AI world model called PAN, which can be used to build physically realistic simulations for testing and honing the performance of AI agents.

Eric Xing, president and professor of MBZUAI and a leading AI researcher, revealed the models and lab at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, today. The UAE has made big investments in AI in recent years under the guidance of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the nation’s tech-savvy national security adviser and younger brother of president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Xing says the UAE’s new center in Sunnyvale, California, will help the nation tap into the world’s most concentrated source of AI knowledge and talent. “We’re creating pathways for knowledge exchange with leading institutions and accessing a talent pool that understands how to scale research into real-world applications,” Xing said in an announcement.

MBZUAI today also revealed ​​PAN-Agent, an experimental AI agent trained to perform reasoning tasks within the PAN world model. MBZAUI says AI researchers will be able to use PAN to test agents in simulated real-world scenarios, including self-driving cars on virtual roads.

A demonstration at today’s event showed PAN being used to simulate self-driving cars navigating busy roads, drones flying through unfamiliar spaces, and robots operating within domestic environments.

Many AI researchers believe that “world models” like PAN will be crucial to building more advanced AI systems, including virtual assistants and robots capable of working in unfamiliar environments. Earlier this week, Google’s AI lead, Demis Hassabis, stressed the importance of world modeling to his company’s AI plans.

Besides the new world model, MBZUAI announced two new large language models (LLMs) at today’s event. K2, a 65-billion parameter model optimized for reasoning tasks, was trained on 80 A100 chips using Nvidia’s DGX Cloud, developed using 35 percent less compute than Meta’s Llama 2 at the same size, Xing says. MBZUAI also revealed Jais, which it says is the world’s most advanced Arabic-language LLM.

President Donald Trump traveled to the Middle East this month to broker deals involving US companies and Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar.

Deals involving US tech giants, including Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Qualcomm, could help propel a boom for the region’s fledgling AI industry by providing crucial AI chips and data center capacity. The deals are also strategically important for the US government because they promise to expand US technological influence ahead of key rival China.

Trump said in Abu Dhabi this month that several unnamed US companies would work with the UAE to build the largest AI data center cluster outside of America. The deal will involve an arrangement designed to prevent the chip or compute power being used by China.