ABU DHABI, 15th October, 2026 (WAM) — Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), through its Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), and Inception42 have introduced Jais 3, a fleet of AI models built for Arabic and part of the Jais family first launched in Abu Dhabi.
Jais 3 understands spoken and written Arabic across dialects, produces Arabic text and carries out practical work, from transcribing conversations to building documents and presentations.
The fleet pairs six open language models, ranging from 900 million to 375 billion parameters, with Jais Speech, a speech recognition model for Arabic and its dialects.
All models are built on K2 Horizon, IFM’s fully open-source foundation model fleet released in September 2026.
The models are trained on Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects, from Emirati and Gulf dialects to North African Arabic, as well as the cultural knowledge the language carries for more than 400 million people who speak it.
Haonan Li, Senior Research Scientist at IFM, said, “Arabic AI needs to understand the language in its everyday context, which varies by geography and across generations. For example, we need to account for the many nuances in spoken Arabic, including when speakers slip into English or French mid-sentence and back again. We built Jais 3 for Arabic as it’s really used.”
Richard Morton, Vice President and Executive Director of IFM, said, “Jais has shown what the UAE’s long-term investment in open AI research can deliver for the Arabic-speaking world. With Jais 3, we are extending that foundation into speech and agents at a time when the UAE is putting AI to work across government and society — reflecting MBZUAI’s commitment to the UAE National AI Strategy 2031 and to building the research capability and national talent that will carry it forward.”
IFM and Inception42 evaluated the models on an audited suite of 24 Arabic benchmarks, which they are releasing publicly alongside the models.
The results showed that the largest Jais 3 model leads open models on agentic tasks and matches the strongest on Arabic understanding.
Jais Speech recorded the lowest average word and character error rates among all models compared, while the 7-billion- and 32-billion-parameter models earned the highest average Arabic scores among open models of comparable sizes.
Dr. Larry Murray, Senior Vice President of Applied Science at Inception42, said, “Jais 3 makes Arabic AI more practical for business use. Stronger reasoning and instruction following, combined with tool use, provide a foundation for multi-step agentic workflows. With open models across a range of sizes, organisations can match these capabilities to their computing budgets and deployment needs.”
Jais Speech transcribes Modern Standard Arabic and dialects spoken across 19 Arab countries in real-world conditions. It follows speakers as they switch between Arabic and languages such as English or French, keeping those words in their original script. It also identifies the dialect being spoken and can add Arabic vowel marks to a transcript.
Paired with the language models, Jais Speech enables Jais 3 to take spoken instructions in Arabic or English and act on them.
Jais 3 stays fluent and consistent across dialects and registers throughout a document and follows detailed instructions closely. In IFM’s and Inception42’s evaluations, the small and mid-size Jais 3 models lead the open models compared on following complex Arabic instructions.
Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception42, said, “Jais has defined what an Arabic large language model can be since the first release, and Jais 3 is the clearest step up yet. Building an Arabic LLM is not a translation exercise. It means training on the dialects people actually speak, the way they write, and the culture the language carries. That is the work we and IFM have done together across every generation of Jais, and it is why, by bringing together six new models, Jais 3 now leads on Arabic across every model size we have built.”
Source: Emirates News Agency