The UAE has achieved another significant milestone in advancing Artificial Intelligence technology. Recently, the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi announced a major step forward in AI development. They revealed that Falcon 40B, the UAE’s first large-scale artificial intelligence model, is now accessible as an open-source platform for research and commercial applications.

In their statement, the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) stated that Falcon 40B represents an achievement in artificial intelligence. It is a foundational large language model (LLM) comprising 40 billion parameters. The model was trained on a vast dataset consisting of one trillion tokens. TII, which operates as a research center under Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), spearheaded this development.

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

TII’s primary objective is to foster transparency, accountability, and the advancement of innovation and research within artificial intelligence. By granting access to the AI model, they aim to empower users to harness the full potential of large language models (LLMs) for practical applications.

“While most LLMs have exclusively granted licenses to non-commercial users, TII has taken a significant leap by providing researchers and commercial users access to the Falcon 40B LLM,” ATRC said.

Dr. Ray O. Johnson, CEO of TII, emphasized the crucial role of computing power in accelerating AI system training and enabling the swift deployment of various use cases.

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