Saudi Arabia enters AI race with AceGPT launch
Saudi Arabias quest to get ahead in the artificial intelligence (AI) game has seen it enter into a partnership with two Chinese universities to create an Arabic-based generative AI system. AceGPT is a significant language model (LLM) leveraging Meta‘s (NASDAQ: META) open-source Llama 2. According to the project’s GitHub page, AceGPT is tailored explicitly to Arabic, going the extra mile to “ensure cultural sensitivity and alignment with local values.” The project is a three-way collaboration between a professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data. The disclosure noted that the model was trained using several methods, including incremental pre-training on Arabic texts and pairing native GPT-4 responses with Arabic inputs. However, it still has several glaring limitations. Since the project is designed for Arabic speakers, queries in other languages may not provide satisfactory responses. Furthermore, the researchers cautioned users over the tool‘s lack of safety checks, noting that bad actors could use this to create harmful content that could trigger the spread of misinformation. They also emphasized the need to catch up in handling users’ sensitive information. To achieve transparency, the projects researchers publicly released its benchmark