Saudi Arabia’s Humain Unveils AI Model Based on China’s MiniMax

Saudi Arabia’s artificial intelligence company Humain has built a national AI platform based on an open model from Chinese lab MiniMax Group Inc., joining a growing list of countries seeking tighter control of the increasingly important technology.

The Public Investment Fund-backed company on Thursday unveiled humain-m3, an Arabic-language model based on MiniMax’s M3, which is freely available for download and customization. Humain, which has invested in data centers and chips as part of a push to position the kingdom as globally competitive in the AI race, said the model reflects the company’s commitment to strengthening the Arabic AI ecosystem while contributing to the global development of frontier intelligence.

Humain-M3 performed the best on average of all frontier models across seven public Arabic benchmarks, Humain said in a statement. It’s been made available through Humain Node, a platform that provides developers and businesses with access to advanced models, the company said.

“Arabic is spoken by hundreds of millions of people, yet it remains significantly underrepresented at the frontier of artificial intelligence,” said Tareq Amin, Humain’s chief executive officer, in the statement. “With humain-m3, we are investing in changing that.”

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The use of Chinese models to build so-called sovereign AI has drawn controversy, mainly in nations aligned with the US. In January, South Korea’s government eliminated Naver Corp. from a shortlist of companies competing to build a national AI model, saying it found partial use of a Chinese vision encoder in its contest entry.

Saudi Arabia joins nations such as France to India determined to stake out their slice of a potentially revolutionary technology, and prevent their industries and workforces from getting left behind by AI. That’s gaining more urgency as US and Chinese firms increasingly dominate the industry, while sector leaders such as Anthropic curtail or restrict access to their models.