Jais Climate: MBZUAI and Core 42 launch first bilingual LLM dedicated to climate intelligence

Today marks the official launch of Jais Climate, the world’s first bilingual large language model (LLM) dedicated to climate and sustainability. Developed through a partnership between Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the world’s first graduate research university dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI), and Core42, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi-based technology holding group G42, Jais Climate aims to inform, inspire, and drive awareness about climate change and sustainability.

As a means of informing national and international discussion, Jais Climate is predominantly fine-tuned with 1.4 million climate-related instructions to also provide detailed information about the UAE’s environmental policies, as well as the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28 UAE, which will convene in Dubai later this month. Jais Climate was trained on ClimaInstruct, the largest instruction-based, bilingual dataset on climate and sustainability-related topics, prepared from various sources in English and Arabic languages.

Designed to support and empower a diverse audience, Jais Climate caters to government decision-makers, business leaders, students, and families, making climate data accessible to more than 274 million Arabic and 1.4 billion English speakers worldwide.

“Jais Climate uses AI to make climate change information accessible and accurate, empowering millions of people to enhance their understanding of these complex issues,” said Eric Xing, MBZUAI’s President and University Professor. “This is especially important as the UAE hosts COP28 UAE, shining a spotlight on how advanced technology and scientific research plays an important role in shaping future, sustainable solutions.”

Andrew Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief AI Officer at Core42 emphasized: “Jais Climate is not just a technological milestone; it’s a testament to how innovation can drive meaningful change and societal progress. Our ambition is that by enabling accessibility to a vast corpus of verified climate data Jais Climate will not only support research but also foster heightened awareness across communities, furthering more conscious behaviors towards our planet.”

Jais Climate is built on Jais 13B, the highest-quality Arabic LLM co-developed by Core42, MBZUAI, and Cerebras Systems, as well as on the technology and lessons learned from Vicuna, an open-source, energy-efficient LLM launched in April 2023. The product of a global collaboration between researchers at MBZUAI, UC Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, and UC San Diego, Vicuna was developed to address the unsustainable costs and resources required for training chatbots.

Jais Climate will be available online at https://www.jaisclimate.com/ae from today until the end of COP28 UAE. The model will also be on display at MBZUAI’s stand at COP28 UAE from November 30 to December 12, 2023, in the Greening Education Hub (Erth), Legacy from the Land of Zayed, that is organized by the Ministry of Education (MoE) in the UAE. ‘AI for Climate’ is one of MBZUAI’s three research pillars, and its key sustainability projects will also be showcased alongside Jais Climate.