Jais (language model)

Jais is an open-source large language model developed in the United Arab Emirates and launched in August 2023. It was trained on both English- and Arabic-language data.

Origin
Jais is named after Jebel Jais, the highest mountain in the United Arab Emirates. It was created in collaboration between Inception, a subsidiary of G42, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi and California-based Cerebras Systems.

Training
Jais has 13 billion parameters, with an update for 30 billion in the works as of October 2023. It was trained for over 21 days by a team in Abu Dhabi on a subset of Cerebras's Condor Galaxy 1 supercomputer.

Its training dataset consisted of Arabic and English, some containing computer code. According to Timothy Baldwin, provost, and professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI, training the model on a diverse Arabic dataset allows it to switch between dialects.

Features
Jais focuses exclusively on English and Arabic translations. Additional functionality for working with images, graphs and tabular data is planned for future releases.