The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and X, École Polytechnique, announced on May 20th a strengthening of their partnership aimed at boosting AI research in France and the United Arab Emirates.
Founded in October 2019 in Abu Dhabi, with the ambition to position the United Arab Emirates as a major scientific hub in AI, MBZUAI officially opened its doors to students in January 2021 with its first cohort of master's and doctoral students in artificial intelligence.
This strengthened collaboration with École Polytechnique extends a memorandum of understanding signed last February on the sidelines of the international scientific conference "AI, Science and Society," organized at X, as part of the AI Action Summit. In April, the two institutions also established an exchange program to facilitate the mobility of students and researchers between Abu Dhabi and Paris.
This enhancement in cooperation will enable the implementation of joint research projects, mobilizing leading researchers from both institutions. The work will focus on improving large language models, developing foundation models for reasoning, as well as exploring AI applications in the fields of biology, health, and security.
The partnership between the two institutions also relies on MBZUAI's presence in France through its Parisian laboratory. This lab recently developed Atlas-Chat, a family of open-source language models specialized in the Moroccan Arabic dialect (darija), with two versions: Atlas-Chat-2B for generating texts in common darija, and Atlas-Chat-9B for advanced uses.
This laboratory is also an integral part of the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), an initiative led by MBZUAI, which brings together teams located in Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley, and Paris to advance the next generation of foundation models.
This collaborative academic research agreement is part of a favorable bilateral framework: the largest AI-dedicated campus in Europe, to be built in the Île-de-France region, will be developed by a Franco-Emirati consortium, including notably the investment fund MGX.
Laura Chaubard, Director General of École Polytechnique, states:
"I am delighted to continue our strategic research partnership with MBZUAI. There are numerous scientific synergies in the fields of AI applied to health, security, and energy transition, as well as in large language models and foundation models for reasoning. I am convinced that these synergies will lead to rich collaborations in the future."