Technology Innovation Institute introduces Falcon 180B open LLM

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The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in the UAE has launched Falcon 180B, an advanced iteration of its flagship large language model (LLM).

With a 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, a statement said.

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, the statement added. The licencing framework for the model is established on ‘Falcon 180B TII License’, which is based upon Apache 2.0.

Faisal Al Bannai, secretary general of the Advanced Technology Research Council, emphasised 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.”

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.”

Compatibility of Falcon 180B

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.

Also read: Abu Dhabi’s TII unveils its Falcon 40B AI model open source