LUMA AI is expanding its presence in Saudi Arabia, establishing its regional headquarters in the Kingdom. The company is partnering with HUMAIN, a Saudi entity, to support the creative industry through AI tools. LUMA AI's technology enables the creation of 3D models from images and videos, catering to the growing demand for digital content in the region. Why it matters: This move signals increasing investment and interest in AI-driven solutions for creative applications within the Saudi Arabian market.
Luma AI, a startup developing multimodal AGI, has raised $900 million in a funding round led by HUMAIN, a Saudi Arabia-based investment firm. The company is focused on building general-purpose AI models that can understand and generate different types of data, including images, video, and 3D scenes. This funding round will allow Luma AI to scale its research and development efforts. Why it matters: This investment signals the growing interest and financial commitment from Saudi Arabian entities in advancing artificial general intelligence capabilities.
This paper presents a UI-level evaluation of ALLaM-34B, an Arabic-centric LLM developed by SDAIA and deployed in the HUMAIN Chat service. The evaluation used a prompt pack spanning various Arabic dialects, code-switching, reasoning, and safety, with outputs scored by frontier LLM judges. Results indicate strong performance in generation, code-switching, MSA handling, reasoning, and improved dialect fidelity, positioning ALLaM-34B as a robust Arabic LLM suitable for real-world use.
KAUST Professor Wolfgang Heidrich is researching computational imaging systems that jointly design optics and image reconstruction algorithms. He focuses on hardware-software co-design for imaging systems with applications in HDR, compact cameras, and hyperspectral imaging. Heidrich's work on HDR displays was the basis for Brightside Technologies, acquired by Dolby in 2007. Why it matters: This research aims to advance imaging technology through AI-driven design, potentially impacting various fields from consumer electronics to scientific research within the region and globally.
G42 has launched Nanda 87B, an open-source Hindi-English LLM developed by MBZUAI in collaboration with Inception and Cerebras. Nanda 87B is built upon Llama-3.1 70B and trained on a dataset with over 65 billion Hindi tokens. The model is engineered for real-world use being fluent in formal Hindi, casual speech, and Hinglish, and is designed for translation, summarization, instruction-following, and transliteration tasks. Why it matters: This release marks a major advancement in creating inclusive AI technology tailored for one of the world's largest linguistic communities.