Saudi Arabia’s AI firm, Humain, has unveiled a conversational AI application for Arab and Muslim users. According to the company, the chat platform will run on its Allam large language model, crafted around the principles of Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Arabic heritage to match the language and thought processes of its users
Though the application is only available in Saudi Arabia at the moment, it will still offer Arabic-English bilingual support and recognize multiple Arabic dialects, including Egyptian and Lebanese.
Amin claims they built the platform with local talent
Tareq Amin, Humain’s chief executive officer, has hailed the platform’s launch as a “historic milestone” in the company’s efforts to develop sovereign AI that is both advanced and culturally rooted. He also noted that the development relied on local talent, with a team of approximately 120 AI specialists, and women represented half of the team.
Additionally, he stated that their LLM, Allam, relies on datasets and controls that mirror regional cultural norms and values, which he claimed could help the kingdom regulate available information.
ALLAM 34B was trained on over eight petabytes of data—the largest Arabic dataset known so far—and fine-tuned by more than 600 domain experts and 250 evaluators from various sectors. However, the chat platform is still set to compete with a similar system, Falcon Arabic, developed by a research division of the Abu Dhabi government.
When Humain first announced the AI project, Amin said the model intended to “serve both public and private sector needs, in Arabic, at scale.” He even claimed this was just his part of a wider investment in GPU clusters, data centers, and edge AI deployments.
The firm’s initiative, nonetheless, supports Vision 2030 goals by developing local tech capabilities, boosting digital infrastructure, and reducing reliance on oil. The company first assumed control of Allam from the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, a government body that had been collaborating with IBM on the project. However, Allam debuts amid global debates over whether developing high-end AI models from scratch is worth the investment. Regionally, it and Falcon are valuable for their comprehensive Arabic outputs and support of local research, but they are not meant to compete with industry giants like ChatGPT.
Humain has secured partnerships with multiple firms
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund-owned Humain was introduced a day prior to US President Donald Trump’s visit in May. The company acquired Nvidia and AMD chips for a major data center project at that time. Now, the company operates across all four core layers of AI: infrastructure, cloud, data and models, and applications.. Amin even said the firm plans to achieve 1.9 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2030.
The company also created an ads and gaming division in June and has shared ambitious plans to invest in data centers, cloud services, and large-language models, including a $10 billion venture capital fund.
Moreover, it has collaborated with several leading firms, including Amazon Web Services. AWS has already pledged to pour in over $5 billion to develop Humain’s AI Zone in Saudi Arabia. Not to mention, the Saudi company is partnering with Nvidia to establish AI “factories” that can support several hundred thousand GPUs and as much as 500 megawatts of computational power.
Humain is also teaming up with Qualcomm to build AI platforms that work across edge and cloud, with Cisco and AMD helping create a secure AI superstructure. At the same time, Humain’s sovereign data centers are hosting OpenAI’s open-source models via Groq, and Replit has rolled out a regional version of its platform on Humain Cloud, with ALLAM 34B providing Arabic coding support.
Get seen where it counts. Advertise in Cryptopolitan Research and reach crypto’s sharpest investors and builders.
Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/saudi-ai-firm-launches-arabic-chatbot/