Saudi Firm Humain Unveils Arabic Language Model Developed With China’s MiniMax

Humain, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned AI company, announced on Thursday an Arabic large language model developed based on Chinese AI firm MiniMax’s model.

The humain-m3 model, built on MiniMax’s M3 open-source model, was pre-trained on more than 1 trillion tokens of Arabic content, according to Humain. The model demonstrates strong performance in Arabic language understanding and reasoning, it said.

The Saudi firm commissioned the project to MiniMax, a Shanghai-based, Hong Kong-listed company that develops LLMs and video generation models.

Humain’s partnership with MiniMax on Saudi Arabia’s localized AI project highlights the difficulties most countries face when they try to develop sovereign AI systems using homegrown technologies. As the U.S. and China dominate advanced AI research and development, other nations often have little choice but to depend on American or Chinese foundational models.

“Arabic is spoken by hundreds of millions of people, yet it remains significantly underrepresented at the frontier of artificial intelligence,” Humain CEO Tareq Amin said in a statement, adding that the new Arabic model is an attempt to change that.