OpenAI recently announced its partnership with Abu Dhabi-based AI and cloud computing company G42. With this move, the likely possibility of UAE competing with OpenAI is subdued, and the strategic partnership may have a little something for both the parties. 

G42 Group CEO Peng Xiao and OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman. Source: G42

OpenAI’s Demographic Push

In G42’s partnership announcement, the company spoke about leveraging OpenAI’s generative AI models for UAE’s financial services, energy, healthcare and many other sectors. OpenAI on the other hand, will not only be able to expand in the Emirates market but also probably leverage G42’s Arabic language model. 

G42 recently launched an Arabic language AI model Jais. The model contains 13 billion parameters and combines Arabic and English data. The model was built as a collaboration within academics and engineers, partly from the scarcity of bilingual language models. Jais was built on supercomputers produced by Cerebras Systems. The partnership with OpenAI will probably help the company achieve its multilingual model goals. 

Altman has been keen on developing demographic specific models. In his visit to Japan in June, Altman spoke about wanting to build models better for Japanese language and culture. Furthermore, he even indicated his desire to start an office in Tokyo. SoftBank has also shown interest in investing in OpenAI. 

With global offices already open in London and Dublin, and Japan soon, it won’t be surprising if UAE is the next stop. 

Public- Private Collab 

In June, Altman met Sheikh Maktoum bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of the UAE, to explore AI development opportunities with the country. The ruler had even tweeted about how they explored ways to strengthen partnerships around AI solutions. 

In the Emirates, the UAE government has been actively involved in the advancements of technological research and development: especially in AI. The government either funds (partners) or advises companies working in the domain. Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the company behind open source large language model Falcon, is a government-funded research institution. TII has been on the forefront of releasing LLM models that surpassed even Meta’s LLaMA capabilities, a few months ago. 

Closely following on the heels of TII, spearheading further AI advancements in the country is G42. Interestingly, UAE national security advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is also the chairman of G42 group. He also chairs sovereign wealth funds including government holding company ADQ worth $110 billion, that controls critical sectors of the economy. Interestingly, UAE was the first country to appoint a Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Omar Sultan Al Olama, in 2017. 

With funding and direction, collaboration with the government has been spearheading AI progress in the country. G42’s latest partnership with OpenAI is a combo to meet the best of both worlds. 

G42 and Big Tech Companies

While OpenAI is the latest collaboration, G42 has tied up with big tech and emerging companies that will help accelerate the AI vision in UAE. G42 announced its partnership with Microsoft, in April, and last month further announced their collaboration to boost cloud and technology infrastructure in the UAE. The companies will focus on AI solutions for health, energy and many other domains: similar to the OpenAI-G42 partnership plan. 

The collaboration will see Microsoft expand its Azure cloud service within UAE by leveraging Khazna Data Centres, which is a joint venture between G42 and government telecom company Etisalat. 

AI compute company Cerebras Technologies had signed a deal with G42 two years ago to bring high-performance AI compute to the Middle East. In July, both the companies unveiled Condor Galaxy, a network of nine interconnected supercomputers that significantly reduces AI model training time. 

The OpenAI-G42 partnership is definitely first of its kind, and we will see more of this in the coming months, emphasising the construction of AI systems through collaboration, rather than competition. As G42 CEO Peng Xiao stated, the partnership represents a “convergence of value and vision,” and Altman believes that this collaboration will help yield effective solutions that “resonate with the nuances of the region.” A win-win for all.  

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