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 Abu Dhabi’s Advanced
Technology Research Council. The UAE, a major oil exporter and influential
Middle East power, is making huge investments in artificial intelligence. But
that bet has also drawn scrutiny from the U.S. officials who last year issued
an ultimatum: American or Chinese technology.
Emirati AI firm G42 pulled out Chinese hardware and divested
stakes in Chinese companies before securing a $1.5 billion investment from
Microsoft that was coordinated with Washington. Advanced Technology Research
Council Secretary General Faisal Al Bannai, who is also an adviser to the
president on strategic research and advanced technology, said the UAE was
demonstrating it can be a major player in artificial intelligence.
The F”lcon 2 series comes as companies and countries are
racing to develop their large language models following the 2022 release of
ChatGPT by OpenAI. While some have opted to keep their AI code proprietary,
others, like UAE’s Falcon and Meta’s Llama, have made their code publicly
available for anyone to use. Al Bannai said he was optimistic about Falcon 2’s
performance and that they were working on “Falcon 3 generation”.
"We're very proud that we can still punch way above our weight, really compete with the best players globally," he said.