UAE's Technology Innovation Institute Unveils Open-source Large Language Model

KUALA LUMPUR, May 26 (Bernama) -- The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) announced that "Falcon 40B", the United Arab Emirates (UAE)'s first large-scale AI model, is now open source for research and commercial use, will strengthen its growing international influence in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

TII is a leading global scientific research centre and the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC).

In a statement, TII said this pioneering move demonstrated Abu Dhabi's commitment to fostering collaboration across sectors and driving advancements in generative AI.

“As the new fuel that drives technological innovation, the move to offer such support will be game-changing in enhancing the capabilities of innovators, and enabling them to push the boundaries of their projects to achieve remarkable advancements,” said its Chief Executive Officer, Dr Ray O. Johnson.

Falcon, a foundational large language model (LLM) with 40 billion parameters, trained on one trillion tokens, grants unprecedented access to researchers and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) innovators alike.

TII is providing access to the model’s weights as a more comprehensive open-source package, with the aim of enabling access to powerful LLM capabilities, promoting transparency and accountability, as well as supporting innovation and research in the field.

While the majority of LLMs have granted exclusive licences solely to non-commercial users, TII has taken a key stride in offering researchers and commercial users access to the Falcon 40B LLM.

In conjunction with the release of Falcon 40B as an open-source model, TII has launched a call for proposals, inviting scientists, researchers and visionaries who are enthusiastic about harnessing the potential of the foundation model.

They are encouraged to contribute their innovative ideas and leverage the model to build inspiring use cases or explore further possibilities for its application to cover areas including engineering, healthcare, sustainability and coding.

As an incentive for exceptional research proposals, selected projects will receive “training compute power” in the form of investment, enabling innovators to leverage robust computational resources for accelerated data analysis, complex modeling and new discoveries.

-- BERNAMA