Saudi Arabia and China collaborate on Arabic-based AI system

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia has collaborated with two Chinese universities to create an Arabic-focused artificial intelligence (AI) system. 

The large language model (LLM) called AceGPT is built on Meta’s LlaMA2 and was launched by a Chinese-American professor at KAUST in collaboration with the School of Data Science, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHKSZ) and the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data (SRIBD).

According to the project’s GitHub page, the model is designed to function as an AI assistant for Arabic speakers and answer queries in Arabic. The disclaimer said it may not produce “satisfactory results” in other languages, however.

Additionally, the developers said the model has been enhanced to recognize possible types of misuse including mishandling sensitive information, producing harmful content, perpetuating misinformation, or failing safety checks. 

However, the project has also cautioned users to be responsible in their use due to a lack of safety checks. 

“We have not conducted an exhaustive safety check on the model, so users should exercise caution. We cannot overemphasize the need for responsible and judicious use of our model.”

AceGPT is said to have been created off open-source data and data crafted by the researchers.

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This development comes as Saudi Arabia continues to make efforts to become a regional leader in emerging technologies such as AI. In July, the central bank of Saudi Arabia collaborated with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority on tokens and payments.

Prior to that, in February the Saudi government partnered with the Sandbox metaverse platform to accelerate future metaverse plans.

In August, U.S. regulators told AI chip maker Nvidia and its rival AMD to curb exports of their high-level semiconductor chips used to develop AI to, vaguely put, “some” Middle Eastern countries. 

However, U.S. regulators have since denied explicitly blocking AI chip exports to the Middle East region.

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