UAE's AI university introduces world's largest 'fully open' models

The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in the United Arab Emirates has unveiled K2 Horizon, one of the largest fully open AI models in history. Consisting of six distinct models, K2 Horizon is designed to allow researchers, developers, and institutions worldwide to examine, build upon, and improve the technology. MBZUAI President Prof Eric Xing emphasized that meaningful AI progress requires openness and collaboration.

Each K2 Horizon model has been developed to compete with existing open models at its size, with weights, code, training data, and methodology readily available for use. The most powerful model, 375B parameters, aims to match leading open-weight models in reasoning and agentic tasks. A standout feature of K2 Horizon is "dynamic model routing," which directs specific tasks to the most cost-effective model for optimal performance.

MBZUAI's K2 Horizon models range from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters and are accessible for download on platforms such as Hugging Face, Ollama, Unsloth, and IFM Repository. Established in 2020, MBZUAI is recognized as the world's first university dedicated to artificial intelligence. The UAE has been actively working to become a global AI leader, diversifying its economy beyond hydrocarbons through initiatives including collaborations with industry giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI.