The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) now offers its new Falcon 180B large language model (LLM) as an open-access tool for both research and commercial applications.
In terms of natural language tasks, Falcon 180B achieves state-of-the-art results, topping the Hugging Face leaderboard for open-access models and competing with proprietary models like Google's PaLM-2.
After its predecessor Falcon 40B reached the top of the Hugging Face Leaderboard for LLMs in May 2023, TII continues its leadership in generative AI. Falcon 40B became one of the first open-source models available to a wide audience. If you're unfamiliar with the Hugging Face leaderboard, it is a ranking of large language models by how open they are.
Specifications and Achievements
Falcon 180B, with its 180 billion parameters, underwent training on 3.5 trillion tokens. In various benchmarks, it outperformed competitors in areas like reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests. Falcon 180B matches the performance of OpenAI's GPT 4 and Google's PaLM 2, even though it's half the size of the latter. The model operates under the ‘Falcon 180B TII License', inspired by Apache 2.0.
H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council, emphasized the institute's commitment to “democratizing access to advanced AI” and ensuring that everyone shares the “benefits of AI”.
Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei, Executive Director and Acting Chief Researcher of the AI Cross-Center Unit at TII, highlighted Falcon 180B's potential, noting it “marks a new era of generative AI” and emphasizes the importance of “collaborative breakthroughs” in addressing global challenges.
Since the initial release of Falcon, over 12 million developers have adopted it. Falcon 180B serves as a new choice for diverse applications, from chatbots to code generation. It supports major languages such as English, German, Spanish, and French and offers capabilities in several other languages.
