A United Arab Emirates (UAE) academic lab today launched an artificial intelligence world model and agent, two large language models (LLMs) and a new research center in Silicon Valley as it ramps up its investment in the cutting-edge field.
The UAEâs 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.
Xing says the UAEâs new center in Sunnyvale, California, will help the nation tap into the worldâs most concentrated source of AI knowledge and talent. âWe’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 ââPAN-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 todayâs event showed PAN being used to simulate self-driving cars navigating busy roads, drones flying through unfamiliar species, and robots operating within domestic environments.
Many AI researchers believe that âworld modelsâ 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, Googleâs AI lead, Demis Hassabis, stressed the importance of world modeling to his companyâs AI plans.
Besides the new world model, MBZUAI announced two new large language models (LLMs) at todayâs event. K2, a 65-billion parameter model optimized for reasoning tasks, was trained on 80 A100 chips using NVIDIAâs DGX Cloud, developed using 35 percent less compute than Metaâs Llama 2 at the same size, Xing says. MBZUAI also revealed Jais, which it says is the worldâs 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 regionâs fledgling AI industry by providing crucial AI chips and datacenter 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 datacenter cluster outside of America. The deal will involve an arrangement designed to prevent the chip or compute power being used by China.