His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, has endorsed the launch of K2 Think, a groundbreaking artificial intelligence model considered to be the most advanced open-source reasoning system in the world.
Sheikh Mohamed affirmed the UAE’s commitment to accelerating investment in advanced technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), leveraging them to achieve national development goals and keep pace with global advancements. He emphasised that these efforts reflect the nation’s vision to secure a better future for generations to come.
The announcement coincided with the birth anniversary of the late Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, recognised for his pivotal contributions to science, technology, and innovation in the UAE.
A Landmark in AI Reasoning
Reasoning is considered one of AI’s most vital capabilities, enabling machines not only to see, hear, and create but also to think more deeply, solve complex challenges, and unlock new frontiers of innovation and scientific exploration.
Developed through a partnership between the Institute of Foundational Models (IFM) at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and G42, K2 Think sets a new benchmark in advanced AI reasoning. As an open-source model, it offers exceptional efficiency, adaptability, and real-world applicability.
His Highness Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Ruler of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Advanced Technology and Artificial Intelligence Council, described the launch as a vital step in reinforcing the UAE’s position as a global leader in advanced technologies and AI. He praised the collaboration between MBZUAI and G42, calling it a model for impactful public–private partnerships that drive national development.
Efficiency Redefined
With just 32 billion parameters, K2 Think surpasses reasoning models up to 20 times larger, marking a transformative leap in efficiency. Its design demonstrates that innovation and smart engineering—not sheer size—will define the future of AI reasoning.
The model is built on six pillars of innovation, including supervised training on “long chains of thought” to enhance logical depth, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to boost accuracy, and agentic planning to break down complex problems before solving them. Additional features such as “test-time scaling” and improved speculative decoding further increase adaptability and performance.
Optimised to run on Cerebras’s large-scale inference platform, K2 Think delivers unprecedented processing speeds of up to 2,000 tokens per second. It currently leads all open-source AI reasoning models in mathematical benchmarks, including AIME ’24/’25, HMMT ’25, and OMNI-Math-HARD.
Voices of Leadership
Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of MBZUAI’s Board of Trustees and Member of the Advanced Technology and Artificial Intelligence Council, noted that K2 Think embodies global leadership in foundational AI research and reflects the UAE’s strong commitment to advancing practical innovations with wide-scale global impact.
Peng Xiao, Founding Board Member of MBZUAI and CEO of G42, highlighted the paradigm shift represented by K2 Think:
“This model proves that the future of AI reasoning lies not in size but in intelligence and efficiency. Thanks to the UAE’s innovation ecosystem, MBZUAI is pushing the boundaries of AI with powerful open-source models that rival—and in some cases outperform—much larger systems.”
Professor Eric Xing, President of MBZUAI, described K2 Think as a milestone achievement:
“By delivering transparent, efficient, and fully reproducible reasoning capabilities, this model marks the beginning of a new era of cost-effective and accountable AI research. It is a proud moment for MBZUAI and our global research community.”
Full Transparency and Accessibility
Unlike most open-source models that release only weights, K2 Think is fully open-sourced, including training data, tokenisation weights, and deployment code. This unprecedented transparency allows the global research community to study, reproduce, and extend its reasoning capabilities.
K2 Think joins a growing portfolio of UAE-developed AI models, including Jais, the world’s most advanced Arabic large language model, as well as NANDA for Hindi and SHERKALA for Kazakh. It builds on the success of K2-65B, the first fully open-source and reproducible foundational model launched in 2024.
Global Access
K2 Think is now publicly available at www.k2think.ai and on Hugging Face, opening the door for researchers and innovators worldwide to harness and extend its advanced reasoning capabilities.
