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 what they claim is one of the largest fully open AI model releases in history, named K2 Horizon. Consisting of six distinct AI models, MBZUAI has made K2 Horizon fully open, enabling researchers, developers and institutions to examine, build upon, and enhance the technology rather than merely accessing it through an API.

MBZUAI president and professor Eric Xing emphasized that the world's most important technology should be constructed collectively, rather than isolated. Developed at MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundational Models, the models were designed to compete with top open models in their respective sizes. The smallest model, 0.9B, can run on a watch, while the largest model, 375B, aims to rival leading open-weight models in reasoning and agentic tasks.

A notable feature of K2 Horizon is its "dynamic model routing" capability, allowing specific tasks to be assigned to the most cost-effective model. The AI models, ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters, are accessible on Hugging Face, Ollama, Unsloth, and IFM Repository. Established in 2020, MBZUAI is acknowledged as the world's first university solely dedicated to artificial intelligence.

The UAE has been actively pursuing AI leadership as it transitions its economy away from hydrocarbons, resulting in collaborations with industry giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, alongside the construction of an AI campus in Abu Dhabi with a capacity of 5 gigawatts for data centers.