Saudi Arabia has launched the SMAI 2 initiative, building upon the original Saudi National Strategy for Data and AI (NSDAI). The new phase aims to accelerate the development of data and AI capabilities within the Kingdom. SMAI 2 will focus on key sectors and strategic priorities to drive economic diversification and societal progress. Why it matters: The initiative signals Saudi Arabia's ongoing commitment to becoming a leader in AI and data-driven innovation.
Researchers from MBZUAI introduced RP-SAM2, a method to improve surgical instrument segmentation by refining point prompts for more stable results. RP-SAM2 uses a novel shift block and compound loss function to reduce sensitivity to point prompt placement, improving segmentation accuracy in data-constrained settings. Experiments on the Cataract1k and CaDIS datasets show that RP-SAM2 enhances segmentation accuracy and reduces variance compared to SAM2, with code available on GitHub.
MBZUAI releases BiMediX2, a bilingual (Arabic-English) Bio-Medical Large Multimodal Model, along with the BiMed-V dataset (1.6M samples) and BiMed-MBench evaluation benchmark. BiMediX2 supports multi-turn conversation in Arabic and English and handles diverse medical imaging modalities. The model achieves state-of-the-art results on medical LLM and LMM benchmarks, outperforming existing methods and GPT-4 in specific evaluations.
Researchers from MBZUAI have introduced VideoMolmo, a large multimodal model for spatio-temporal pointing conditioned on textual descriptions. The model incorporates a temporal module with an attention mechanism and a temporal mask fusion pipeline using SAM2 for improved coherence across video sequences. They also curated a dataset of 72k video-caption pairs and introduced VPoS-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating generalization across real-world scenarios, with code and models publicly available.
MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) has released K2 Think V2, a 70 billion parameter open-source general reasoning model built on K2 V2 Instruct. The model excels in complex reasoning benchmarks like AIME2025 and GPQA-Diamond, and features a low hallucination rate with long context reasoning capabilities. K2 Think V2 is fully sovereign and open, from pre-training through post-training, using IFM-curated data and a Guru dataset. Why it matters: This release contributes to closing the gap between community-owned reproducible AI and proprietary models, particularly in reasoning and long-context understanding for Arabic NLP tasks.
MBZUAI, G42, and Cerebras Systems have launched K2 Think V2, a 70-billion parameter reasoning system built on the K2-V2 base model. K2 Think V2 is fully open-source, from pre-training data to post-training alignment, ensuring transparency and reproducibility. It achieves leading results on complex reasoning benchmarks like AIME2025 and GPQA-Diamond. Why it matters: This release marks a significant advancement in the UAE's AI capabilities, demonstrating leadership in building globally accessible and fully sovereign AI systems focused on reasoning.
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi has launched a 2-micrometer high-power fiber laser for medical and industrial applications. Developed by TII's Directed Energy Research Center, the Thulium-based laser is efficient, compact, and scalable, enabling precise interaction with water-rich materials. TII has partnered with LIMA Photonics, a German MedTech startup, to integrate the laser into clinical solutions, including urinary stone treatment and prostate surgery. Why it matters: This laser technology and partnership showcase the UAE's commitment to translating advanced research into healthcare solutions, positioning Abu Dhabi as a hub for medical technology innovation.