A research arm of the Abu Dhabi government has released an updated version of Falcon, its artificial intelligence model, that a senior official said outperforms rivals and proves the emirate is a “serious player” in the global AI race. Falcon is a large language model like OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini — computing systems that power chatbots, image generators and other generative AI tools. First launched in 2023, Falcon is open-source, which means its code is shared widely. Its new version, Falcon 2 11B, is more powerful than the latest comparable open-source model from Meta Platforms Inc. and is on par with Gemini by some metrics, according to the Technology Innovation Institute, or TII, the Abu Dhabi group behind Falcon. “We were able to achieve way higher performance than a lot of the bigger guys,” Faisal Al Bannai, the secretary general of the Advanced Technology Research Council, the government entity that funds TII, said in an interview. “And at a fraction of their compute and a fraction of their team size.” The United Arab Emirates is making a concerted top-down push into AI, framing the technology as the next pillar of its economy after oil. The Gulf nation has introduced a slew of new businesses and an AI investment vehicle that could reach $100 billion. While the UAE and Saudi Arabia have announced ambitious AI investment plans, both Gulf nations have had to import much of their engineering expertise and are just beginning to apply generative AI tools into businesses. A representative for TII said the first version of Falcon was downloaded more than 43 million times as of the first quarter of the year. Meta has said that its most recent Llama model received 170 million downloads.
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