UAE Launches Arabic-language AI Model, AI Competition In Gulf Heats Up
JAKARTA - The United Arab Emirates (UAE) officially launched the latest Arabic artificial intelligence (AI) model on Wednesday, May 21. This marks a major step in the increasingly intensive technological race in the Gulf region.
This launch is part of UAE's big ambition to become a major player in global AI. This oil-producing country has invested billions of dollars to develop its AI capabilities, including building close ties with the United States in order to gain access to the most advanced technology.
During a visit by US President Donald Trump to the Gulf last week, it was agreed that the AI cooperation between the US and the UAE, which paved the way for the country to obtain advanced AI semiconductors from American technology companies, made a big achievement for the UAE.
The new model, named Falcon Arabic, was developed by the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) in Abu Dhabi. According to an official statement, Falcon Arabic is designed to capture the linguistic diversity of the Arab world through a high-quality Arabic original data collection, not translation.
"Today's AI leaders are not just a matter of scale. It's about creating powerful tools, useful, easy to use, and universal in nature," said ATRC Secretary General Faisal Al Bannai, quoted by VOI from Reuters.
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In addition to Falcon Arabic, the ATRC also launched Falcon H1, a state-of-the-art AI system that is claimed to outperform its competitors from Meta and Alibaba. Its main advantage lies in efficiency requiring much lower computing power and technical expertise than other similar systems.
The AI issue also became the center of attention during President Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia, which helped promote himself as a global AI center candidate outside the US. Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia launched a new company to develop and manage AI technology and infrastructure. The company is targeting to present one of the most powerful multimodal language models in the world.
With ambitious initiatives from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf region is now one of the main arenas in the global competition for AI technology development, especially those focused on Arabic language and culture.