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The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and Abu Dhabi-based G42 launched K2 Think, an open-source system for advanced AI reasoning that delivers performance on par with the most powerful reasoning models at a fraction of their size.

With 32 billion parameters, K2 Think outperforms flagship reasoning models nearly 20 times larger, according to MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models.

The system ranks among the top reasoning models globally, leading all open-source models in math benchmarks including AIME '24/'25, HMMT '25 and OMNI-Math-HARD.

What K2 Think offers

Built on six pillars of innovation, K2 Think employs chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, agentic planning, and test-time scaling.

It will also be available on Cerebras' wafer-scale compute platform, optimised for speculative decoding at 2,000 tokens per second.

Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of MBZUAI's Board of Trustees and Member of the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council (AIATC), said: "The new global benchmark set by K2 Think underscores the pioneering excellence of MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models initiative. It is also an example of the UAE's commitment to building advanced systems that are developed by our institutions and shared with the world."

Peng Xiao, MBZUAI board member and group CEO of G42, said: "K2 Think has shifted the AI reasoning paradigm from 'bigger is better' to 'smarter is better'... By proving that smaller, more resourceful models can rival the largest reasoning systems, this milestone marks the beginning of the next wave of AI innovation."

Unlike most models that only release weights, K2 Think is fully open source, including training data, weights, and deployment software.

Professor Eric Xing, MBZUAI president, said the system represents "a new era of cost-effective, reproducible and accountable AI."

MBZUAI's open-source family of models

K2 Think extends MBZUAI's open-source family of models including Jais (Arabic), NANDA (Hindi) and SHERKALA (Kazakh), and builds on K2-65B, the world's first fully reproducible open-source foundation model released in 2024.

K2 Think is available at K2Think.Ai/K2Think and on Hugging Face.

Read: MBZUAI's Rawdha Almeraikhi on how Emirati women are driving innovation