World’s most powerful open LLM

27 September 2023 AI & ML

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is pushing the boundaries of generative AI with the launch of Falcon 180B, an advanced iteration of its flagship large language model (LLM). This groundbreaking release offers Falcon 180B as an open access model for research and commercial purposes.

Following the success of Falcon 40B, an open-source AI model that rose to the top of the Hugging Face Leaderboard for LLMs in May 2023, TII 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, 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 democratising 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 has soared 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.

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