Humain, Saudi Arabia’s leading artificial intelligence company, has launched a conversational AI app for Arabs and Muslims as the kingdom seeks regional leadership in the technology.
Powered by its Allam large language model, Humain Chat is designed around Islamic values and heritage, the company said in a statement on Monday. The app, initially only available in Saudi Arabia, will accommodate bilingual conversations in Arabic and English and work with multiple Arabic dialects including Egyptian and Lebanese.
Tareq Amin, the company’s chief executive officer, said the launch marks a “historic milestone in our mission to build sovereign Al that is both technically advanced and culturally authentic,” while stressing it was built in Saudi Arabia by Saudi talent. The team behind the chatbot involved 120 AI specialists, half of whom are women.
Allam is trained on data sets and safeguards which reflect the region’s culture and values, according to Amin. Those sorts of controls could also help the kingdom restrict what information is available. It challenges a similar model being developed by a research arm of the Abu Dhabi government called Falcon Arabic.
Humain took on Allam from the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, a government agency that had been working on the model with International Business Machines Corp. Humain absorbed at least 95 SDAIA employees this year.
Allam’s launch comes at a time when companies over the world have been rethinking whether the significant cost of building cutting-edge AI models from scratch is worthwhile. Allam and Falcon are valuable regionally, because they offer more comprehensive Arabic outputs and help strengthen homegrown research, but they aren’t necessarily aiming to compete with larger models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Owned by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, Humain was unveiled a day before US President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in May. The firm secured Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. semiconductors for a massive data center project during that visit. Amin said the company will build 1.9 gigawatts of data centers by 2030.
In June, Humain formed a unit focused on ads and gaming. The company has also shared plans to spend heavily on data centers, cloud-computing and large-language models, and is planning a $10 billion venture capital fund.
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