The New Stack Makers

The name "Falcon" for the UAE’s large language model (LLM) symbolizes the national bird's qualities of courage and perseverance, reflecting the vision of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi. TII, launched in 2020, addresses AI’s rapid advancements and unintended consequences by fostering an open-source approach to enhance community understanding and control of AI. In this New Stack Makers, Dr. Hakim Hacid, Executive Director and Acting Chief Researcher, Technology Innovation Institute emphasized the importance of perseverance and innovation in overcoming challenges. Falcon gained attention for being the first truly open model with capabilities matching many closed-source models, opening new possibilities for practitioners and industry. Last June, Falcon introduced a 40-billion parameter model, outperforming the LLaMA-65B, with smaller models enabling local inference without the cloud. The latest 180-billion parameter model, trained on 3.5 trillion tokens, illustrates Falcon’s commitment to