DESERT POWER

The United Arab Emirates-using oil wealth and its citizens' data-is betting on AI to project influence beyond its borders

- Billy Perrigo, Leslie Dickstein

AT AN AI RESEARCH LAB ON THE EDGES OF Abu Dhabi last year, an international team of 25 computer scientists were putting the finishing touches on a deep learning algorithm before sending it to be trained on 4,000 powerful computer chips. The AI system, which cost several million dollars to train, was funded by an arm of the Abu Dhabi government called the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC).

Despite the government's substantial investment, ATRC secretary general Faisal AI Bannai decided to release the finished model online for free. If it was as good as the team believed, the boost to the United Arab Emirates' reputation would be all the return the government needed on its investment, he reasoned. The plan worked. When the AI, named Falcon after the UAE's national bird, was publicly released last September, it became a sensation. By some measures it was the best open-source large language model (LLM) available in the world at that point, outperforming top offerings from Meta and Google. Before Falcon's release, "we were not on the map," says AI Bannai. But "with 25 people, we did that. And it really created a surprise."

Around the world, computer scientists took notice. "The UAE was not well known, before, for training models," says Philipp Schmid, an AI researcher at the machine-learning platform Hugging Face based in Germany. "But then, by more or less the next day, we knew that they can train models, they open-source their models, they publish research around it, which benefits all."