A generative AI program is being developed through a collaboration between Saudi Arabia and IBM, focusing on multiple Arabic dialects. The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) has announced that their Arabic large language model ALLaM, will be integrated into IBM’s AI and data platform, Watsonx.
Watsonx is widely used by companies for creating editorial content, developing chatbots, and writing programming code. This includes applications like scripting for video games and customer service chatbots.
Watson research has been pioneered in IBM Israel. Researchers David Carmel and Dafna Sheinwald from IBM Israel played a key role in building Watson, the supercomputer that played Jeopardy in 2011 – and won. Watson won USD 77,147, which was donated to various charities, besting Ken Jennings’s USD 24,000 and Brad Rutter’s USD 21,600.
This research will be applied to better understand Arabic language models. ALLaM stands out for its ability to retrieve and generate information in both audio and text formats across various Arabic dialects, a challenge that has long puzzled developers.
This collaboration is expected to drive further technological advancements, according to Esam Alwagait, director of SDAIA.
The development of ALLaM could lead to a surge in Arabic GPT text generators, similar to Google’s Gemini, X’s Grok, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Trained on hundreds of millions of articles in both Arabic and English, ALLaM aims to overcome the traditional challenges of working with Arabic dialects.
