The UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has released what it describes as one of the largest "fully open" model releases in AI history.
MBZUAI on Thursday announced K2 Horizon, which the Abu Dhabi-based university says is actually six different AI models.
Prof Eric Xing, MBZUAI president and professor, said that K2 Horizon is fully open, making it possible for other researchers, developers and institutions to develop and inspect code, training data and methodology.
"We believe meaningful AI progress depends on the ability to examine, build upon and improve the technology, not simply access it through an API," Prof Xing said.
"The most important technology of our time should be built with the world, not kept from it."
K2 Horizon AI models were developed at MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundational Models.
Hector Liu, director of IFM’s Silicon Valley research lab, explained the decision to release six different versions of K2 Horizon. One of the models, 0.9B, is small enough to run on a watch, Mr Liu said.
“Every model is built to compete with the best open models at its size, and everyone ships with the weights, code, training data and methodology behind it,” he said.
“Developers can prototype on the smallest model, scale to the flagship and verify every claim we make along the way."
K2 Horizon’s 375B model, according to MBZUAI, is the most powerful and is “built to compete with leading open-weight models on reasoning and agentic work”.
The models also include something that MBZUAI calls "dynamic model routing", which makes it possible for certain tasks to be directed to “the most cost effective model”.
The university also says that K2 Horizon makes use of a “mixture of value architecture” that sharpens AI reasoning without adding the need for more computing power.
MBZUAI described K2 Horizon as "ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters". In the context of AI, a parameter is a variable that can help increase the accuracy of large language model predictions.
The university's latest fleet of AI models is available for download on Hugging Face, Ollama, Unsloth and IFM Repository.
MBZUAI opened in 2020, and is considered to be the world’s first artificial intelligence-dedicated university.
In recent years, the UAE has pushed to be an AI leader as it diversifies its economy away from hydrocarbons.
This has resulted in the establishment of start-ups, partnerships and investments from industry leaders including Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI.
The UAE has also teamed up with the US to develop an AI campus that will include 5 gigawatts of capacity for data centres, in Abu Dhabi.
