HUMAIN to launch a powerful new Arabic AI model suite
Saudi AI company HUMAIN aims to release new ALLaM 34B AI model later this month
#SaudiArabia #LLMs - HUMAIN, the new national artificial intelligence company formed by Public Investment Fund (PIF), will launch a new Arabic-centric AI model by the end of August, according to comments made to Middle East AI News by CEO Tareq Amin. The new AI model ALLaM 34B has been trained and fine-tuned for performance in the Arabic language and Arab culture, with a focus on Saudi Arabia. Amin told Middle East AI News that an entire HUMAIN Chat application suite has been developed around the new AI model. The AI company was launched in May, to drive and develop a wide range of key technology areas for the Kingdom including next-generation data centres, advanced AI infrastructure, and Arabic AI models.
SO WHAT? - HUMAIN was formed via the merger of several other technology operations including SCAI (Saudi Company for AI) and the AI model development team of SDAIA (Saudi Data & Artificial Intelligence Authority), whilst bringing in AI experts from Aramco Digital and Tonomus. The company has also taken over the development and commercialisation of ALLaM, the sovereign large language model developed by SDAIA. However, the new HUMAIN model that is expected to be announced this month is not simply a new version of the last ALLaM model. The new ALLaM 34B model has been developed and trained from scratch.
Here are some key points about HUMAIN and its AI model development:
Saudi Arabia’s national AI company HUMAIN will launch a new Arabic-centric AI model ALLaM 34B by the end of August, according to CEO Tareq Amin.
Amin told Middle East AI News that the new Generative AI model has been trained and fine-tuned for performance in the Arabic language and Arab culture, with a focus on Saudi Arabia.
ALLaM 34B is not being launched as a stand-alone model, but has been developed with an entire HUMAIN Chat application suite to make it business-ready.
HUMAIN announced a comprehensive approach to developing Saudi Arabia’s AI value chain earlier this year. The company’s scope includes developing advanced Arabic large language models and AI-native platforms designed to serve sovereign, enterprise and AI laboratory customers globally.
In May HUMAIN released a new AI OS platform called HUMAIN OS, which provides a unified Arabic/English conversational interface that replaces traditional siloed access to enterprise applications.
This month HUMAIN partner Groq made OpenAI’s new open-weight gpt-oss models available in Saudi Arabia on Day Zero, via GroqCloud servers in Dammam, so we can expect that HUMAIN Chat will also run on GroqCloud.
SDAIA developed the first suite of ALLaM large language models in 2023/2024, releasing ALLaM 13b on IBM’s Watson-x platform in May 2024. ALLaM was then made available via Microsoft Azure in September 2024.
ZOOM OUT - The race has been on to develop a powerful, multi-purpose Arabic Generative AI model since 2023, which saw both the UAE’s G42 and SDAIA rush to produce Arabic-centric sovereign large language models. Since then, new versions of both models have been developed, to improve performance, Arabic linguistic capability, ease-of-deployment and business relevance. However, despite advances, many developers of Arabic GenAI platforms have built or fine-tuned their own AI models in preference to using national Arabic models. Meanwhile, public AI cloud services have not yet been brought to market to compete directly with GenAI cloud services from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
[ 100% human written and edited ]
Read more about HUMAIN:
Groq & HUMAIN deploy Open AI models on Day Zero (Middle East AI News)
HUMAIN & Luma AI form Create (Middle East AI News)
HUMAIN & AMD target 6GW of AI compute by 2034 (Middle East AI News)
HUMAIN developing game-changing AI OS platform (Middle East AI News)
Saudi HUMAIN to create $10 billion venture fund (Middle East AI News)