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MBZUAI launches K2 Think, a low-cost reasoning model to rival global AI giants
The model is built on Alibaba's open-source Qwen 2.5 and tested using hardware from AI chipmaker Cerebras. It was developed in collaboration with G42, a UAE-based firm backed by Microsoft.
While DeepSeek's flagship R1 model boasts 671 billion parameters, K2 Think is significantly smaller with just 32 billion parameters, according to media reports.
The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in the UAE has unveiled K2 Think, a low-cost reasoning model designed to compete with major players like OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek.
While DeepSeek's flagship R1 model boasts 671 billion parameters, K2 Think is significantly smaller with just 32 billion parameters, according to media reports. The model is built on Alibaba's open-source Qwen 2.5 and tested using hardware from AI chipmaker Cerebras. It was developed in collaboration with G42, a UAE-based firm backed by Microsoft, stated media reports.
Despite its smaller size, K2 Think performs competitively on several key benchmarks, including:
???? AIME24, AIME25
???? OMNI-Math-HARD, GPQA-Diamond (science reasoning)
???? LiveCodeBenchv5 (coding)
???? HMMT25
According to a Moneycontrol report, Hector Liu, head of MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models, noted that the model’s performance was achieved by combining techniques like chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning for step-by-step reasoning, and test-time scaling, which enhances inference by applying extra compute during runtime.
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