UAE’s Arabic-language AI potent tool that was recently unveiled for Arabic speakers worldwide, could pave the way for large language model systems in other languages.

Large language model AI — artificial intelligence that has been trained on enormous amounts of internet data to respond to text commands — has gained attention as a result of the introduction of Chat-GPT and comparable platforms.

Despite the Middle East's growing interest in AI, Arabic-language models have lagged behind. However, a group of scholars, scientists, and engineers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently unveiled a potent tool designed for Arabic speakers worldwide, which, according to its developers, could pave the way for large language model (LLM) systems in other languages that are "underrepresented in mainstream AI."

The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi and Inception, a division of UAE-based AI Company G42, collaborated to develop "Jais," which is named after the tallest mountain in the United Arab Emirates. Cerebras Systems is based in Silicon Valley.

Although ChatGPT, Meta's LLaMA, and other LLMs support Arabic, Timothy Baldwin, interim provost and professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI, claims that they were primarily trained on English data from the internet.

The Latin alphabet is used in the vast majority of online languages, with the English language being undoubtedly the most widely used. This suggests that data in those languages represent the largest, according to Mohammed Soliman, director of the Middle East Institute's strategic technologies and cyber security program in Washington, DC.