The United Arab Emirates wants to compete with the U.S. and China in AI, and a new open source model may be its strongest contender yet.

An Emirati AI lab called the Institute of Foundation Models released K2 Think on Tuesday, a model that researchers say rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek in standard benchmark tests.

“With just 32 billion parameters, it outperforms flagship reasoning models that are 20x larger,” the lab wrote in a press release on Tuesday. DeepSeek’s R1 has 671 billion parameters, though only 37 billion are active. Meta’s latest Llama 4 models range from 17 billion to 288 billion active parameters . OpenAI doesn’t share parameter information.

Researchers also claim that K2 Think leads “all open-source models in math performance” across several

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