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Institute of Foundation Models
An AI research lab launched by MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi that builds fully open foundation models, publishing training data and methods alongside the weights.
IFM was launched in May 2025 by the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and now runs labs in Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley and Paris. Its stated position is that open weights are not the same as open source, and that science only works when other people can inspect the data and repeat the experiment.
Its best-known work is the K2 series of fully open language models, alongside Jais, an Arabic-language model, and PAN, a world model aimed at simulating physical environments. It is one of the few labs outside the US and China releasing models at frontier scale.
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