A new open-source GenAI model from a government research agency, Technology Innovation Institute (TII), in the United Arab Emirates was revealed on Monday; it may compete with OpenAI, Google, and Llama 3.
H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of ATRC and Strategic Research and Advanced Technology Affairs Advisor to the UAE President, disclosed the development in a media release on Monday.
Similar to Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT, the Falcon 2 series—which includes the Falcon 2 11B and Falcon 2 11B VLM—was formally unveiled with the expectation of revolutionising text and picture processing.
The Falcon 2 series comes as nations and businesses scramble to create their massive language models in the wake of OpenAI’s 2022 release of ChatGPT.
While some have chosen to keep their AI code confidential, others—such as Falcon from the United Arab Emirates and Llama from Meta—have made their code openly accessible to all.
Experts opined that Falcon 2 broadens the range of AI applications across several areas, from healthcare and finance to education and law, with its multilingual support and vision-to-language capabilities.
Al Bannai while expressing optimism on the new launch 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.”
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), a significant oil exporter and powerful nation in the Middle East, is heavily investing in AI. However, American officials have also expressed concern about that wager. A year ago, they issued a challenge: use Chinese or American technology.
After removing Chinese hardware and selling holdings in Chinese businesses, the Emirati AI startup G42 was able to secure a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft through a diplomatic process with the Chinese government.