According to reporting by The New York Times, the United Arab Emirates has joined the US and China in giving away artificial intelligence technology with the launch of K2 Think, a compact but high-performing reasoning model developed by the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and Abu Dhabi-based technology group G42.

At just 32 billion parameters, K2 Think is small by today’s standards, but benchmarks show it competes with and, in some cases, outperforms reasoning models up to twenty times its size. It achieves this through a combination of advanced training strategies, including chain-of-thought fine-tuning, agentic planning, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, and test-time scaling. The result is a model that prioritises efficiency without sacrificing depth of reasoning.

The Times noted that the system was trained on only about 2,000 specialised chips, far fewer than the hundreds of thousands used by frontier labs, and that the UAE has released the model fully open-source, making its data, weights, and code publicly available. In a sector increasingly dominated by closed ecosystems, the choice to share the technology freely signals the Emirates’ ambition to position itself alongside leading players like OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek.

BTB So What?

AI is fast proving itself to be the great equaliser, and unlike past waves of industrial or digital innovation that demanded heavy infrastructure or geographic advantage, today’s models can be trained, shared, and scaled from anywhere. India is already showing what this looks like with Sarvam-M, a 24-billion-parameter multilingual model optimised for ten Indic languages, and national efforts like BharatGen, designed to embed linguistic and cultural diversity into AI at scale. In Latin America, Latam-GPT, a collaborative project spanning over 20 countries, is building an open-source model rooted in local languages and identities to ensure sovereignty over the region’s digital future.

It’s in this context that the Middle East’s K2 Think feels less like an outlier and more like the next chapter in a global trend. The region is primed for it: ChatGPT already holds nearly 90% market share in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, well above the global average of around 81%—and 58% of consumers in the UAE and KSA use generative AI regularly across work, education, and personal life. If the Middle East has already set the pace in fintech, e-commerce, and digital content, it’s no surprise it now wants to own a piece of AI’s mantle too.