News

Careem Suspends Its Ride-Hailing Services In Qatar

The announcement comes without any official explanation, though is thought to be due to a lack of regulatory approval.

Published

3 years ago

February 28, 2023

careem suspends its ride-hailing services in qatar

Yesterday (Monday, February 27), Uber Technologies sent a message to customers informing them that Careem, the Dubai-based company acquired by the ride-hailing giant in 2019 for $3.1 billion, will cease operations in Qatar today.

The surprise announcement comes just two months after Qatar’s soccer World Cup, which saw Careem-branded vehicles forming part of the official transport infrastructure, alongside Uber cars and local taxis from Karwa.

careem qatar message to users

“Unfortunately, Careem’s ride-hailing operations will no longer operate in Qatar as of February 28, 2023,” informed the message, telling customers that Careem credit would be refunded by March 15, 2023.

Also Read: Saudi Arabia To Transform Downtown Riyadh By 2030

Careem’s message did not explain the cancellation of the service, and no one has responded to requests for comment, including parent company Uber.

Careem only offered ride-hailing services in Qatar, unlike larger Middle Eastern markets like the United Arab Emirates, where the super app also provides food delivery, digital payments and courier services.

The company suspended its services in Lebanon last year due to the unfavorable economic situation in the country.

News

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.

Published

2 days ago

January 15, 2026

Nour Nasir

uae-built falcon-h1 arabic leads llm benchmarks

Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute

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.

Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push

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.