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Abu Dhabi-Developed AI Arabic Language Model Unveiled
The open-source bilingual model is called Jais and is more accurate than existing Arabic implementations, developers say.
A new AI Arabic language model has been unveiled by Abu Dhabi-based Inception, a subsidiary of G42. The project aims to bring one of the world’s most widely used languages into the AI mainstream.
Jais — named after Jebel Jais, the highest mountain peak in the UAE — was developed for government use and financial, energy, climate, and healthcare applications. The open-source bilingual Arabic-English model was built with additional input from the Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Cerebras Systems, based in Silicon Valley.
Jais developers claim the new AI language model is more accurate than previous Arabic LLMs. The software also represents a further step towards encouraging scientific and computing communities to work in languages other than English.
“We see Jais becoming very useful in generative use cases, such as generating responses to questions, generating documents, translations, emails, and even providing advice and recommendations,” said Andrew Jackson, CEO of Inception.
As well as understanding context and cultural references, Jais can also capture linguistic nuances across various Arabic dialects, “making it more accurate and contextually relevant than other models,” the developers said.
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Jais was trained using Condor Galaxy, the “world’s largest AI supercomputer”, launched by parent company G42 and Cerebras in July. The software is continuously expanding as more Arabic content is curated, according to the companies involved.
WorldData ranks Arabic as one of the world’s most widespread languages, with over 400 million speakers. It is the official language of 22 countries and is partly spoken in 11 more. However, despite a dramatic rise in Arabic content, the language still only represents around 1% of the online space, according to data presented by G42 and Cerberus.
Jais software is available to download on the machine learning platform Hugging Face.
News
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.
Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.
The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.
Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc
— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026
“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.
Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.
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The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.
Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
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