Public AI services are easy to try, but every prompt and document sent to them leaves your network. For UAE organisations that work with customer records, contracts, claims or student data, that is a real concern. A growing alternative is to run a large language model (LLM) on your own servers.
What a locally hosted LLM is
An LLM is the kind of model behind today's AI assistants. With an open-weight model, you can download the model itself and run it on hardware you control, on your premises or in a private environment. Your applications then call your own model instead of an outside service.
The UAE has helped make this practical. Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute released its Falcon models as open source, starting with Falcon 40B in 2023, under terms that allow commercial use. In the same year, G42's Inception and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence released Jais, an open Arabic and English model.
Why organisations choose it
- Data stays inside your network. Documents, prompts and outputs are not sent to outside providers, which supports PDPL compliance and sector rules such as those for health data.
- Your data is not used to train public models. You decide what the model sees and keeps.
- Predictable costs. You pay for hardware and support rather than per request, which suits high, steady volumes such as document processing.
- Control. You decide which model version runs, when it is updated and who can use it.
What it takes
Running models locally needs a suitable server, usually with one or more GPUs, sized to the model and the volume of work. It also needs someone to deploy, monitor and update the model. Smaller, well-chosen models often perform very well on focused tasks, such as extracting fields from documents or answering questions from a fixed set of course materials.
When cloud AI still makes sense
For non-sensitive tasks, early experiments or occasional use, cloud AI services can be quicker to start with. Many organisations use both: cloud tools for general productivity, and local models for sensitive or high-volume work.
Our AI Solutions run on locally hosted LLMs: Structured Data Extraction for documents, and AI Tools for Education for schools and training centres.
Private AI, on your premises
Structured Data Extraction and AI Tools for Education both run on a local LLM installed inside your network.