Technology Innovation Institute (TII) and LightOn, a technology company that unlocks Extreme-Scale Machine Intelligence for businesses, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to build the NOOR Platform for exascale computing for foundation models.
As part of the collaboration, TII will leverage LightOn’s know-how in large language models to build cross-disciplinary, cutting-edge expertise in this new generation of AI research, with applications that can find use cases across our deep-tech Research Centers. LightOn uses best-in-class exascale hardware and innovative training schemes to shape large-scale foundation models for augmented work and creativity.
The first output to emerge from the NOOR platform will be the largest and most powerful language model to date in Arabic, with applications in automated summarisation, chatbots, and personalised marketing. Offering end-to-end pipeline high quality data, including crawling, filtering and curation at scale, the model will facilitate extreme-scale distributed training and serving – delivering applications with efficient inference and model specialisation.
Foundation models embody a new convergence between AI and HPC and redefine new computer architectures while offering an enormous opportunity to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges in science, technology and business. The new generation of AI foundation models are disrupting AI research through unleashing new capabilities – models that multitask, perform functions they have not been explicitly trained for, or train on data that is not labelled. With the NOOR platform, TII and LightOn are ready to take on climate change, drug development and other societal challenges.
Prof. Mérouane Debbah, Chief Researcher, AI & Telecoms Systems at TII, said: “We believe the NOOR platform will open multiple AI-driven entrepreneurship opportunities and build credibility for Abu Dhabi as a center of AI excellence. This first-of-its-kind large-language model – our launch offering on the platform - is set to boost the UAE’s ambitions as a high-tech innovation leader and hub for Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. Through LightOn’s expertise in combining HPC and AI technologies to shape innovative advancements, the NOOR platform hopes to ultimately build AI models that can give all of TII’s advanced technology Centers access to cutting-edge AI models.”
Igor Carron, CEO and Co-founder, LightOn, said: “This collaboration is the first step toward accelerating AI transversal development in every aspect of Science and Engineering. In a hundred years from now, people will only remember that the early 2020’s were an inflection point for industrialisation of Artificial General Intelligence. We very much look forward to partnering with TII to take these steps and make AI truly transformative and impactful with the NOOR platform.”
Researchers can now access an unprecedented set of tools to address scientific problems at exascale - computing systems – or supercomputers capable of calculating at least 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second.
