UAE’s TII Launches Falcon 2 Series That Outpowers LLama 3

Date: May 20, 2024

Abu Dhabi’s AI development organization, Technology Innovation Institute, has released its latest Falcon 2 Series, which outshines Meta’s Llama 3 model.

The Technology Innovation Institute based in Abu Dhabi has unveiled its latest iteration of Falcon AI, releasing the Falcon 2 Series, which has already impressed worldwide spectators. TII is an applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), which focuses on developing the latest technological capabilities that compete with the world’s renowned innovation leaders.

The new Falcon Series has already overturned Meta’s Llama 3's leader position and performed at par with Google’s Gemma. A trusted independent agency, Hugging Face, tested the three platforms, pitting them against each other’s training parameters to perform the same tasks. Falcon 2, trained under 11 billion parameters, outperformed Llama 3, which was trained on 8 billion parameters. Similarly, Falcon 2 scored almost the same as Google’s Gemma, with their respective scores being 64.28 and 64.29. 

Falcon 2 Series comes in two versions, one standard and one Falcon 2 VLM. Falcon 2 VLM is currently the only top-tier AI software in the market with image-to-text conversion capability. This achievement underscores the UAE’s advancement in the AI innovation landscape. As part of its efforts to create an inclusive AI capability, the Falcon 2 series and its VLM version have been kept open-source to help developers worldwide get unrestricted access to the technology.

H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of ATRC and Strategic Research and Advanced Technology Affairs Advisor to the UAE President, said: "With the release of Falcon 2 11B, we've introduced the first model in the Falcon 2 series. While Falcon 2 11B has demonstrated outstanding performance, we reaffirm our commitment to the open-source movement with it and to the Falcon Foundation. With other multimodal models soon coming to the market in various sizes, our aim is to ensure that developers and entities that value their privacy have access to one of the best AI models to enable their AI journey."

Soon, AI development efforts will broaden to the Falcon 2 next-generation models, introducing a range of sizes that can run completely on various devices. These models will further develop advanced machine learning capabilities, including the 'Mixture of Experts' (MoE) functionality, to push their performance to even more sophisticated levels. To date, TII’s every AI introduction of Large Language Models has remained one of the top leaders in AI technology.