Saudi Arabia commissions MiniMax to develop local Arabic model

HUMAIN, a subsidiary of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund (PIF), has released 'humain-m3', an Arabic-specialized frontier model. The model was developed by Chinese AI company MiniMax and is based on the MiniMax-M3 lineage.

Model Specifications and Development Background

• Architecture: A Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 428B parameters
• Training Data: Approximately 1 trillion additional tokens used for Arabic pre-training
• Development Method: Commissioned by HUMAIN and developed by MiniMax

License and Implications

The model weights are scheduled to be released next month under the MiniMax Community License. This means that although it is a sovereign AI model for Saudi Arabia, the licensing terms are determined by the Chinese company MiniMax. The author assessed that training a frontier base model from scratch for a single language is inefficient, and leveraging an existing lineage is a rational choice.