19 January 2025, Sun |
12:51 AM
19 January 2025, Sun |
12:51 AM
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in the United Arab Emirates has once again pushed the boundaries of generative AI with the official launch of Falcon 180B, a remarkable advancement of its flagship large language model (LLM). This significant development reaffirms the UAE’s position as a global leader in AI, as Falcon 180B is made available as an open-access model for both research and commercial applications.
Following the remarkable success of Falcon 40B, an open-source AI model that rapidly climbed to the top of the Hugging Face Leaderboard for LLMs in May 2023, TII, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), continues to lead the way in generative AI. Falcon 40B marked a pioneering leap in the field, as one of the first open-source models accessible to researchers and commercial users alike.
H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council, emphasized the transformative impact of Falcon on the AI landscape, stating, “We envision a future where the transformative power of AI is within everyone’s reach. We are committed to democratizing access to advanced AI, as our privacy and the potential impact of AI on humanity should not be controlled by a select few. While we may not have all the answers, our resolve remains unwavering: to collaborate and contribute to the open-source community, ensuring that the benefits of AI are shared by all.”
Falcon 180B boasts an impressive 180 billion parameters and has been trained on a staggering 3.5 trillion tokens, solidifying its position at the pinnacle of the Hugging Face Leaderboard for pretrained LLMs. It outperforms notable competitors such as Meta’s LLaMA 2 in various benchmarks, including reasoning, coding proficiency, and knowledge tests.
Among the top closed-source LLMs, Falcon 180B ranks just behind OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 and performs on par with Google’s PaLM 2 Large, the model powering Bard, despite being only half its size. The licensing framework for Falcon 180B is established under the ‘Falcon 180B TII License’, based on the Apache 2.0 license.
Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei, Executive Director and Acting Chief Researcher of the AI Cross-Center Unit at TII, commented, “The launch of Falcon 180B exemplifies our dedication to advancing the frontiers of AI, and we are thrilled to share its limitless potential with the world. Falcon 180B heralds a new era of generative AI, where the potential of scientific advancement is made available through open access to fuel the innovations of tomorrow. As we delve into the frontiers of science and technology, our vision extends far beyond innovation; it’s about nurturing a profound connection to address global challenges through collaborative breakthroughs.”
With over 12 million developers already adopting and deploying the first release of Falcon, this significant upgrade is poised to become the premier model for various domains, from chatbots to code generation, and beyond.
Falcon 180B offers compatibility with major languages such as English, German, Spanish, and French, with limited capabilities in Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Romanian, Czech, and Swedish.
For more information on Falcon 180B and its potential applications, please visit the official Technology Innovation Institute website or contact their team directly.
