{"id":2313,"date":"2024-11-04T10:57:36","date_gmt":"2024-11-04T10:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/insight.thomsonreuters.com\/mena\/legal\/?p=2313"},"modified":"2024-11-07T05:30:17","modified_gmt":"2024-11-07T05:30:17","slug":"uae-bets-big-on-digitisation-and-ai-in-transition-from-fossil-fuel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/insight.thomsonreuters.com\/mena\/legal\/posts\/uae-bets-big-on-digitisation-and-ai-in-transition-from-fossil-fuel","title":{"rendered":"UAE bets big on digitisation and AI in transition from fossil fuel\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The UAE is looking to the future by diversifying its economy, expanding from oil into sectors such as data and technology. The Technology Innovation Institute\u2019s (TII) (which is part of the Abu Dhabi Government\u2019s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC)<\/a> release of Falcon 2, UAE\u2019s flagship large language model (LLM), is a testament to the UAE\u2019s efforts to assert itself as a worldwide digital and Artificial Intelligence (AI) hub.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2022 release of Open AI\u2019s ChatGPT has been a driving force behind countries and companies developing their own LLMs. The UAE, however, has been proactively building digital infrastructure and investing in technology research and development (R&D) long before ChatGPT made its debut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UAE has been an early adopter of AI, appointing the world\u2019s first Minister for AI, His Excellency Omar Sultan Al Olama in 2017. In recent years, the UAE has significantly accelerated the pace of technology and AI development. The UAE Cabinet adopted the UAE National Strategy for Artificial intelligence 2031<\/a>, which aims to establish the UAE as a global leader in AI and to create an integrated system that uses AI in key sectors in the UAE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How will the UAE boost socio-economic growth?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In April 2024, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in UAE\u2019s top AI firm, G42. The partnership aims to support advanced AI capabilities, to improve enterprise experience and accelerate digital transformation in key UAE industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The partnership will also support programs like the Artificial Intelligence Program managed by the National Program for Artificial Intelligence. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence will create \u2018a new generation of skilled and diverse AI experts.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boosting the talent pool of AI specialists is key for the UAE. Skilled workers are essential for state-led initiatives like Digital Dubai, which has digitised 90% of Dubai\u2019s government services, and the \u2018Smart City\u2019<\/a> project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UAE advances global AI superpower race with latest Falcon 2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The UAE\u2019s next-gen Falcon 2 challenges big tech competitors, outperforming Meta Llama 38B and performing on par with Google\u2019s Gemma 7B, according to results from Hugging Face, a trusted AI community platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Falcon 2 features a text-based model (Falcon 2 11B), and a vision-to-language model (Falcon 2 11B VLM) that can convert an uploaded image into a text description. Its capabilities have positioned it as a serious challenger to LLMs built by Open AI, Google and Meta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Falcon 2 11B VLM is TII\u2019s first multimodal model. According to TII, the \u2018image-to-text conversion capability is a key AI innovation\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of ATRC and Strategic Research and Advanced Technology Affairs Advisor to the UAE President has stated “We reaffirm our commitment to the open-source movement with it, and to the Falcon Foundation,\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWith other multimodal models soon coming to the market in various sizes, our aim is to ensure that developers and entities that value their privacy have access to one of the best AI models to enable their AI journey.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UAE\u2019s Golden Visa<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As part of the UAE\u2019s plan to attract foreign investors and talent, the UAE government introduced the UAE Golden Visa scheme A Golden Visa is a long-term, renewable residence visa valid for 5 or 10 years, available to certain categories of persons, including entrepreneurs. The Golden Visa scheme aims to attract innovators worldwide to test, grow and launch their big ideas in the UAE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The advantages of a Golden Visa include:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n