MBZUAI and Inception42 launch Jais 3
Six open Arabic models up to 375B (MoE, 512K context, Apache 2.0) plus Jais Speech
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 19 October 2026
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Key facts
- Family: Jais-3-0.9B, 3.7B, 7B, 32B, MoVA-36B-A4B and the flagship Jais-3-375B-A23B (sparse MoE, 375B stored, 23B active per token, 512K context), each with five training checkpoints (Hugging Face model card; Gulf News)
- Licence: Apache 2.0 (model card); weights uploaded to huggingface.co/inception42 on Sept 29, 2026, public launch Oct 15; vLLM and SGLang support
- Base: K2 Horizon, IFM’s fully open foundation model family released in September 2026
- Developers’ own results on 24 Arabic benchmarks (suite released): at 7B, the average Arabic score rises from 56.4 (K2 Horizon base) to 79.6; the 375B model ‘leads open models on agentic tasks’; not independently checked
- Jais Speech: transcribes Modern Standard Arabic and dialects of 19 countries, keeps code-switched English or French words in their script, identifies the dialect and can add vowel marks; claimed lowest average WER/CER among compared systems, including commercial ones
- Quotes: Haonan Li (IFM): ‘We built Jais 3 for Arabic as it’s really used’; Ashish Koshy (Inception42 CEO): ‘Building an Arabic LLM is not a translation exercise’
What happened
The UAE’s MBZUAI (Institute of Foundation Models) and Inception42 released the third generation of Jais, the best-known Arabic-first model line, as six open models with checkpoints, a public 24-benchmark Arabic evaluation suite and a speech model. The flagship is a 375B-parameter MoE with 23B active parameters and a 512K-token context, under Apache 2.0.
Why it matters
It is the largest openly licensed Arabic-native model and part of the Gulf’s sovereign-AI push; the developers’ claims of leading open models on Arabic and agentic tasks have not yet been independently tested. Found through a model-release tracker, not Techmeme.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 1 primary, 3 press
Primary
- Hugging Face: inception42/Jais-3-375B-A23B model cardhuggingface.co, code
Press
- Gulf News: UAE launches Jais 3, Arabic-native AI for speech, writing and agentsgulfnews.com, press
- WAM: MBZUAI, Inception42 launch Jais 3 Arabic AI modelswam.ae, press
- HPCwire: MBZUAI and Inception42 introduce Jais 3 (403 for us)hpcwire.com, press
Changes
- Filed (web search for recent releases)