Saudi Arabia taps China’s MiniMax for Arabic AI model

Saudi Arabia’s state-owned artificial intelligence startup Humain has unveiled a new Arabic-language model developed with Chinese AI firm MiniMax. 

Announced during the LEAP technology conference in Riyadh on Sept. 3, the development signals that the kingdom continues deepening AI ties with China while simultaneously pursuing major US technology partnerships — keeping the Gulf state at the center of an intensifying technology race between Washington and Beijing that is increasingly playing out in the Middle East. 

Details: Humain, a PIF-owned AI company launched last year, announced that it had commissioned MiniMax to deliver Humain-m3, a frontier Arabic-language model based on the Chinese company’s AI systems. 

The model is available initially as a research preview through Humain Node, the company’s platform for giving developers, researchers and enterprises access to AI models and inference capabilities. The Saudi firm said Humain-m3 achieved the highest average score among the frontier models tested across seven public Arabic-language benchmarks. It plans to publicly release the model after the research and evaluation phase.