Calls for Proposals: SME Entrepreneurs and the Global Research Community Are Invited to Use Falcon LLM for AI Use Cases.
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a preeminent international scientific research hub and the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has announced that “Falcon 40B,” the UAE’s first significant AI model, is now open source for research and commercial use. This move has increased the institute’s growing international influence in the artificial intelligence field. Abu Dhabi’s dedication to fostering cross-sector collaboration and advancing generative AI is demonstrated by this trailblazing action.
Falcon, a fundamental large language model (LLM) trained on one trillion tokens and 40 billion parameters, gives academics and innovators from small and medium-sized businesses (SME) unprecedented access. In order to enable access to robust LLM capabilities, encourage openness and accountability, and foster innovation and research in the field, TII is making the model’s weights available as part of a larger open-source package.
Due to the improved possibilities they give for tuning compared to those without, developers are finding LLMs with access to model weights more desirable in the present AI landscape. While the bulk of LLMs have only provided exclusive licences to non-commercial users, TII has made significant progress by making the Falcon 40B LLM available to researchers and business users.
A call for ideas has been issued by TII in connection with the release of Falcon 40B as an open-source model, asking experts who are excited about realising the potential of the foundation model. They are urged to offer their creative suggestions, use the model to develop motivating use cases, or investigate other opportunities for its application to include fields like engineering, healthcare, sustainability, coding, and many more.
Selected projects will get “training compute power” in the form of financing as a reward for outstanding research proposals, enabling pioneers to make use of powerful computational capabilities for rapid data processing, intricate modelling, and novel discoveries. This assistance will encourage and hasten the growth of innovative concepts by giving the tools required to transform them into significant AI solutions that are both economically and socially beneficial.
The Falcon, which was originally presented in March 2023, demonstrated outstanding performance and underlined the UAE’s dedication to technical advancement. Falcon 40B surpassed its known competitors by using a great deal less training computing power, according to Stanford University’s HELM LLM benchmarking tool. The tool proved TII’s dedication to developing advancements in generative AI by only requiring 75% of the training compute of OpenAI’s GPT-3, 40% of DeepMind’s Chinchilla AI, and 80% of Google’s PaLM-62B. A major achievement is Falcon 40B, which was developed by TII’s AI and Digital Science Research Centre (AIDRC). The same team also introduced NOOR, the biggest Arabic NLP model in the world, last year, and is on schedule to create and introduce Falcon 180B shortly.
