The UAE is eyeing partnerships with several countries, including India, to give its AI development plans a fillip.

Hakim Hacid, executive director and acting chief researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) that created UAE’s Falcon LLM, had said that India is a neighbouring country, with several immigrants making up a sizeable portion of the workforce in the country.

“We have internally initiated [efforts] on [achieving] multi-linguality and integrating Urdu because we have a lot of immigrants in the UAE who are coming from India. The Urdu language is as important as Arabic in the UAE,” he said.

The country will likely collaborate with Indian-based companies working on a multilingual model, like BharatGPT’s Hanooman.

Similarly, last week, it was reported that Microsoft had invested $1.5bn in UAE-based AI company G42, with Microsoft president Brad Smith joining the company’s board. Shortly after this development, sources within the US government stated that several more partnerships were being drawn up between the two countries.

Specifically, there were reports that the US government was behind the Microsoft-G42 deal, and is working to forge partnerships between UAE and major industry players like Google and OpenAI.

This would explain why both OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang have been seen rubbing shoulders with the country’s AI stalwarts.

However, these partnerships aren’t a matter of pure luck. The partnerships with both the US and potentially with India, come on the heels of the UAE cutting off ties with China in terms of AI development.

Was China Behind This?

UAE’s initial AI-inclined partnerships were forged with China, wherein G42 had collaborated with Huawei for the use of their equipment to help roll out 5G as well as for cloud capabilities. However, this and several collaborations between the two countries had remained a cause for concern for the States.

With Washington raising concerns on their partnerships, and China’s potential use of data from an American ally, G42 had severed their partnership in favour of American partnerships.

Late last year, promises were also made by G42 that ties would be severed with their Chinese counterparts. “For better or worse, as a commercial company, we are in a position where we have to make a choice. We cannot work with both sides,” said Peng Xiao, G42 CEO.

With ties severed, it seems that the UAE is keen on forging partnerships with the US as well as its allies in order to improve its AI capabilities and infrastructure.

“The talks are part of Washington’s efforts to achieve supremacy over Beijing in the development of artificial intelligence and other sensitive technologies,” the Financial Times recently reported. Commerce secretary Gina Raimonda had been heavily involved with the Microsoft-G42 deal, according to the report.

Likewise, according to FT, sources who had been briefed about the talks between the two governments on the deal had stated, “The UAE views data as the new oil. It realised that it had to find a new way to exist between the US and China because of US concerns about Chinese tech. They’ve since been having very productive conversations, with Raimondo in particular.”

Apart from the current collaborations and investments from US-based companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, the Gulf country has also expressed its interest in collaborating with other US allies.

Investments Going In and Coming Out

While a lack of Chinese intervention has left the UAE keen on forging collaborations with other countries, the same is true the other way around as well.

As Altman recently said, “For a bunch of reasons, the UAE would be well-positioned to be a leader in the discussions around that”, which was specifically for creating a watchdog organisation to monitor AI systems, along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In December last year, UAE and India signed an MoU for joint research in several fields including artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, the UK has made it clear that a partnership with the UAE in terms of AI is at the top of their priorities.

In February, the UK secretary of state for science, innovation and technology Michelle Donelan visited the UAE to get a broader picture of where the country stands on AI and to forge partnerships with them. “We’re going to take learnings from one another as we plot out a way forward on this,” she said.

Similarly, the UAE has also been proactive about who they want to invest in, with reports of officials reaching out to European-based startups.

“We already have been approached by people from outside the European Union asking us basically: ‘Oh, now with all that horrible regulation, don’t you want to move your AI R&D company?’” said Jonas Andrulis, the founder of Germany-based Aleph Alpha.

UAE’s Ease of Access

UAE’s first AI minister, Omar Al Olama, has been key in paving the way for ensuring that AI development continues unhindered in the country. Olama had backed Altman’s suggestion of turning the UAE into a “sandbox” for AI.

Similarly, the UAE has prided itself on providing access to data that would otherwise be unavailable to companies in other countries.

UAE’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) general secretary Faisal Al Bannai said that right now the country provides a good mix of access to data, research funding and infrastructure, making it a goldmine for researchers.

The country, for instance, had no qualms about allowing companies to train on private data, like patient medical data but stripped of any identifying information.

“It is a place made out of heaven for researchers in AI. There aren’t many places that have all of this under one roof. Try to go to some countries and get access to data to train. OK, good luck,” he had told Bloomberg.

With a government full of more open-minded and AI-inclined officials, it seems that the country is way more open to allowing experimentation and embracing its role as an AI sandbox. This means that the UAE is taking avid advantage of a gap that is passing by their counterparts.

As Al Bannai said, “You can either debate forever or you can move. We have decided to move.”