Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has announced the pilot launch of Karnak Chat, a conversational AI assistant built on the Karnak large language model.
Developed by Egyptian teams at the ministry’s Applied Innovation Center (AIC), Karnak was created by enhancing global open-source models and retraining them on curated data and documents from Egypt and the wider Arab world, according to the ministry.
The model is designed to understand and generate both Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic, while supporting applications that reflect Arab cultural and Egyptian national contexts. The ministry also said Karnak can help strengthen digital sovereignty by enabling software and applications to run within local data centers when needed.
Karnak Chat is available to try for free through its website, with a mobile application also offered through Google Play. The ministry said a free version of Karnak is additionally available through Hugging Face for developers building Arabic AI applications.
The launch positions Karnak as a foundation for generative AI applications in Egypt and the Arab world, as well as a public-facing assistant focused on Arabic-language use cases.
Source: Karnak AIC
