UAE launches new low-cost AI model, challenging OpenAI and DeepSeek. Meet K2 Think

A new, cheaper artificial intelligence (AI) model has entered the technology race, this time from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday unveiled the release of a low-cost reasoning model that it hopes will rival DeepSeek and OpenAI. 

In January, the AI bubble got a shot of air after China-based research lab DeepSeek said it had been closely catching up to the achievements of the United States’s OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, using a fraction of its budget and energy. 

The UAE’s model, called K2 Think, is smaller in terms of parameters, or 

the configuration variables of a machine learning model which control how it processes data and makes predictions, compared to its AI competitors, including DeepSeek. However, the researchers behind it say its performance is on par with OpenAI and DeepSeek’s reasoning models. 

The university said in a press release that its K2 Think is “a new class of reasoning model,” adding that “it employs long chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning to strengthen logical depth, followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to sharpen accuracy on hard problems”.

“What was special about our model is we treat it more like a system than just a model,” Hector Liu, director of MBZUAI’s institute of foundation models, told CNBC in an interview.

“So, unlike a regular open source model where we can just release the model, we actually deploy the model and see how we can improve the model over time”.

MBZUAI also said that it is “one of the fastest and most efficient reasoning systems in existence”. It says K2 Think can achieve 2,000 tokens per second, which is roughly 1,500 words. 

K2 Think was built on Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 large language model and is run on hardware from AI chipmaker Cerebras. 

Like DeepSeek’s R1 model, K2 Think is also open source, meaning its training data and weights are available to the public.

“This new level of transparency ensures that every step of how the model learns to reason can be studied, reproduced, and extended by the global research community,” the university said. 

The global AI race

The technology could have major implications for the global AI race. 

Though the US, followed by China, reigns supreme, other countries are trying to make their mark in AI. 

“K2 Think is a defining moment for AI in the UAE,” MBZUAI said. “It reflects how open innovation and close public–private partnerships can position Abu Dhabi as a global leader in AI, demonstrating that the future of reasoning will be shaped not only by size, but by ingenuity and collaboration”.