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

Image credit: WAM

Abu Dhabi‘s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has bolstered its growing international influence in the field of artificial intelligence by announcing that ‘Falcon 40B’, the UAE’s first large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) model, is now open source for research and commercial use.

Falcon 40B is a foundational large language model (LLM) with 40 billion parameters and trained on one trillion tokens, TII a research centre within Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) said in a statement.

TII is providing access to the model’s weights as a more comprehensive open-source package, to enable access to powerful LLM capabilities, promote transparency and accountability and support innovation and research in the field.

“While the majority of LLMs have granted exclusive licences solely to non-commercial users, TII has taken a key stride in offering researchers and commercial users access to the Falcon 40B LLM,” said ATRC.

Falcon, which was first unveiled in March 2023, showcased exceptional performance and underscored the UAE’s commitment to technological progress.

Based on Stanford University’s HELM LLM benchmarking tool, Falcon 40B outperformed its renowned counterparts in utilising significantly less training compute power.

“Computing power plays a pivotal role in expediting AI system training and enabling faster implementation of use cases,” Dr. Ray O. Johnson, CEO of TII said while noting that as the new fuel that drives tech innovation, the move to offer such support will be game-changing in enhancing the capabilities of innovators.

It will also enable innovators to push the boundaries of their projects to achieve remarkable advancements.

Falcon 40B – our game-changing AI model is now open source for research and commercial use.

We are also providing access to the model’s weights to give researchers and developers a chance to use it to bring their innovative ideas to life. pic.twitter.com/fApOKYjIPU

— Technology Innovation Institute (@TIIuae) May 25, 2023

With only 75 per cent of the training compute of OpenAI’s GPT-3, 40 per cent of DeepMind’s Chinchilla AI and 80 per cent of the training compute of Google’s PaLM-62B, the tool substantiated TII’s commitment to advancing developments in generative AI.

TII envisions future of Falcon 40B

TII also launched a call for proposals in conjunction with the release of Falcon 40B as an open-source model, inviting scientists, researchers and visionaries who are enthusiastic about harnessing the potential of the foundation model.

They are encouraged to contribute their innovative ideas and leverage the model to build inspiring use cases or explore further possibilities for its application to cover areas like engineering, healthcare, sustainability, coding, and much more.

As an incentive for exceptional research proposals, selected projects will receive “training compute power” in the form of investment, enabling innovators to leverage robust computational resources for accelerated data analysis, complex modelling, and new discoveries.

Generative AI models are the technologies that power applications like OpenAI’s bot ChatGPT. The UAE climbed five places to rank as the top Arab country and the 37^th out of 166 countries in the UN Frontier Technologies Readiness Index 2023.

“The open-source release of Falcon 40B, 7.5B, and 1.3B parameter AI models and our high-quality REFINEDWEB dataset, exemplifies the profound scientific contributions of the UAE,” said Dr Ebtesam Almazrouei, director of AI Cross-Centre Unit, TII.

“With each breakthrough, we defy limitations, reshape the realm of possibilities, and pave the way for collaborative efforts with transformative impact.”

Complementing a long list of progressive technology milestones, the open-source generative AI model is set to boost the UAE’s credentials as a mainstream AI player.

Abu Dhabi’s tech industry has grown exponentially over the years and includes AI and cloud computing company G42 Group and defence technology group EDGE.