UAE's MBZUAI Unveils K2 Horizon, Marking One of the Largest Fully Open AI Model Releases in History

The UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has released what it describes as one of the largest "fully open" model releases in AI history. MBZUAI announced K2 Horizon on Tuesday, which the Abu Dhabi-based university says consists of six different AI models.

Prof Eric Xing, MBZUAI president and professor, stated that K2 Horizon is fully open, enabling other researchers, developers, and institutions to inspect and develop code, training data, and methodology. "We believe meaningful AI progress depends on the ability to examine, build upon and improve the technology, not simply access it through an API," Prof Xing said. "The most important technology of our time should be built with the world, not kept from it."

The K2 Horizon AI models were developed at MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundational Models. Hector Liu, director of IFM’s Silicon Valley research lab, explained the decision to release six different versions of K2 Horizon. One of the models, 0.9B, is small enough to run on a watch, according to Mr Liu. “Every model is built to compete with the best open models at its size, and everyone ships with the weights, code, training data and methodology behind it,” he noted.

K2 Horizon’s 375B model is the most powerful and is designed to compete with leading open-weight models on reasoning and agentic work. The models also feature "dynamic model routing" to direct specific tasks to the most cost-effective model, alongside a "mixture of value architecture" that enhances AI reasoning without requiring additional computing power.

Ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters, the university's latest fleet of AI models is currently available for download on Hugging Face, Ollama, Unsloth, and IFM Repository.

Established in 2020, MBZUAI is recognized as the world’s first artificial intelligence-dedicated university. In recent years, the UAE has advanced its position as an AI leader to diversify its economy away from hydrocarbons, driving partnerships and investments with industry leaders such as Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, as well as collaborating with the US on a planned AI campus in Abu Dhabi.