The United Arab Emirates (UAE) releases its open-source GenAI model, Falcon 2, aiming to compete with big tech companies. Falcon 2 includes two models: Falcon 2 11B for text and Falcon 2 11B VLM for generating descriptions from images.
A government research institute in the United Arab Emirates on Monday released a new open source GenAI model, which could rival the ones from big technology companies.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) said it was releasing the Falcon 2 series: Falcon 2 11B, a text-based model, and Falcon 2 11B VLM, a vision-to-language model that can generate a text description of an uploaded image.
TII is a research center within the Abu Dhabi Advanced Technology Research Council.
The UAE, a major oil exporter and influential power in the Middle East, is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. However, this bet has also come under intense scrutiny from US authorities, who last year issued an ultimatum: “Either American technology or Chinese technology.”
Emirati AI company G42 exited Chinese hardware and sold stakes in Chinese companies before coordinating with Washington to secure $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft.
Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council and Presidential Advisor for Strategic Research and Advanced Technology, said the UAE has shown that it can become a major player in the field of artificial intelligence. .
The Falcon 2 series arrives at a time when companies and countries are racing to develop their own large-scale language models after OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. Some companies have chosen to keep their AI code proprietary, while others, such as Falcon in the United Arab Emirates and Llama in Meta, have made their code available to everyone.
Al Bannai said he is optimistic about Falcon 2’s performance and is working on “Falcon 3 generation”.
“We’re very proud that we still punch well above our weight and can truly compete with the best in the world,” he said.