The UAE has sought to position itself as a global leader in AI in a bid to diversify its economy beyond crude oil dependency.
A new challenger in the global artificial intelligence race has entered the ring.
The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), an AI-focused research university established by the United Arab Emirates, announced on Tuesday the release of a new, low-cost reasoning model to rival OpenAI and DeepSeek.
It comes after DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, earlier this year shocked the world with the release of a reasoning model called R1 which it said could outperform OpenAI but with far less training costs.
At just 32 billion parameters, MBZUAI’s model, dubbed K2 Think, is much smaller than competing systems from OpenAI and DeepSeek. It was built on top of Alibaba’s open-source Qwen 2.5 model and is run and tested on hardware provided by AI chipmaker Cerebas.
For context, DeepSeek’s R1 has a total of 671 billion parameters, which is essentially another term for the variables that an AI language model learns to understand and generate language. OpenAI doesn’t disclose the parameter counts of its AI models.
K2 Think was developed in partnership with G42, the buzzy UAE-based AI firm backed by U.S. tech giant Microsoft. The researchers behind it say it delivers performance on par with the flagship reasoning models of OpenAI and DeepSeek — despite being a fraction of the size.
They cited the benchmarks AIME24, AIME25, HMMT25 and OMNI-Math-HARD, which relate to math, coding benchmark LiveCodeBenchv5 and science benchmark GPQA-Diamond.How did they do it?
Hector Liu, director of MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models, told CNBC the team behind K2 Think were able to achieve such high levels of performance by using a number of methods.
