The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in the
United Arab Emirates (UAE) is pushing the boundaries of generative AI once
again with the launch of Falcon 180B, an advanced iteration of its flagship
large language model (LLM). This groundbreaking release strengthens the UAE's
dominance in AI, offering Falcon 180B as an open-access model for research and
commercial purposes.
Following the remarkable success of Falcon 40B,
an open-source AI model that swiftly ascended to the top of the Hugging Face
Leaderboard for LLMs in May 2023, TII, the applied research pillar of Abu
Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) continues to lead the
charge in generative AI. Falcon 40B marked one of the first instances of open-source
models for both researchers and commercial users, and it was considered a
pioneering leap in the field.
H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the
Advanced Technology Research Council, emphasized the positive impact of Falcon
on the AI landscape and said: “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.”
With a staggering 180 billion parameters and
trained on 3.5 trillion tokens, Falcon 180B soars to the top of the Hugging
Face Leaderboard for pretrained LLMs. It outperforms notable competitors like Meta’s
LLaMA 2 in various benchmarks, including reasoning, coding, proficiency, and
knowledge tests.
Among the best closed source LLMs, Falcon 180B
ranks just behind OpenAI's latest GPT 4 and is on par with the performance of
Google's PaLM 2 Large, the model powering Bard – despite being half the size of
the model. The
licensing framework for the model is established on ‘Falcon 180B TII License’,
which is based upon Apache 2.0.
Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei, Executive Director and
Acting Chief Researcher of the AI Cross-Center Unit at TII, said: "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
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 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 is compatible with the following
major languages: English, German, Spanish, and French, with limited
capabilities in Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Romanian, Czech, and
Swedish.