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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.
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Lebanon Ministers Meet Visa Over National Digital Payment Platform
Finance and technology ministers say a comparative study and roadmap will follow before any decision on adopting a model.
Lebanon’s finance and technology ministers met representatives from Visa last week to discuss a proposed unified national digital payment platform for government services, according to a readout from the Ministry of Finance.
The meeting brought together Finance Minister Yassin Jaber, Minister of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence Kamal Shehadeh, a Visa delegation, and experts from both ministries. Discussion focused on whether Lebanon could establish a single platform through which citizens and institutions would pay taxes, fees, fines and other official transactions electronically, using mobile phones and other digital channels.
The Visa delegation presented examples from countries that have adopted unified government payment platforms, including the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Estonia and Jordan. According to the readout, the examples were presented as having increased collection rates and expanded financial inclusion.
Talks covered settlement mechanisms, direct transfer to the treasury account, financial reconciliation, risk management, cybersecurity, fees, and an operational model that would involve the private sector. The parties agreed to continue technical and institutional consultations, prepare a comparative study, and develop an implementation roadmap before any decision on adopting a model for Lebanon.
Jaber said the Ministry of Finance had already enabled citizens to pay using credit cards and e-wallets through transfer companies, but described the proposed platform as a further step. He framed the development of electronic payment and collection systems as a priority within the ministry’s modernization plan.
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Shehadeh outlined the citizen-facing concept as a single mobile application through which users could settle obligations to ministries, government institutions and other bodies.
“The idea, in short, is that any citizen downloads an application on their mobile phone, through which they can pay all service obligations for all ministries, government institutions, or those owned by the Lebanese state, and others as well, as the platform is not limited only to state institutions,” he said.
Shehadeh added that the platform would not displace banks and money transfer companies that currently provide collection services to the state, calling it complementary to their work.
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