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Abu Dhabi Launches World’s Biggest Self-Driving Car Race
The Autonomous Racing League will see 10 teams from around the world competing in specially built Dallara Super Formula cars.
Abu Dhabi has launched what it calls “the world’s biggest racing league for self-driving cars“. The vehicles use advanced technologies and AI, and the series is aimed at promoting driverless technology.
The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) will take place on April 28, 2024, at the Yas Marina Circuit. The prize fund amounts to $2.25 million, with 10 teams competing for a slice of the winnings. Aspire, the development arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, revealed its plans for the upcoming race at GITEX Global on Monday.
Autonomous race teams will mostly be made up of universities and research organizations. The event will see a number of countries involved, including the UAE, USA, China, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Singapore, and Switzerland.
For the race, teams will all use the same base vehicle, though they will be allowed to tweak its software algorithms. The machine itself is a brand new Italian-developed Dallara Super Formula SF23. The single-seater uses biocomposite panels made from a mixture of “flax fiber, cork, and recycled carbon fiber”. Weighing in at just under 700kg, the car is the fastest open-wheel racer outside of Formula One, capable of a max speed of 300kph.
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“We will combine state-of-the-art motor racing parts with robotic technology and AI to deliver an extreme sporting experience. Our racing is not just applicable to transportation. It is also useful in advancing sectors such as health care and logistics. And to that end, in addition to car racing, we will stage autonomous drone and buggy racing,” said Tom McCarthy, Aspire’s executive director.
Aspire is taking a similar approach to other autonomous race series, allowing all teams from previous self-driving competitions to participate, along with university-affiliated teams and public and private research institutions. Eventually, organizers hope that some of the advanced technology and robotics used in cars will filter down to regular production vehicles.
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UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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