A new challenger in the global artificial intelligence race has entered the ring.

The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), an AI-focused research university established by the United Arab Emirates, announced on Tuesday the release of a new, low-cost reasoning model to rival OpenAI and DeepSeek.

It comes after DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, earlier this year shocked the world with the release of a reasoning model called R1 which it said could outperform OpenAI but with far less training costs.

At just 32 billion parameters, MBZUAI's model, dubbed K2 Think, is much smaller than competing systems from OpenAI and DeepSeek. It was built on top of Alibaba's open-source Qwen 2.5 model and is run and tested on hardware provided by AI chipmaker Cerebas.

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