The United Arab Emirates (one of the world’s leading tourist destinations) has significantly upgraded its position in the global AI race by releasing two original AI models developed by Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII), which is the applied research arm of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). These releases highlight the UAE’s push towards becoming a global AI leader by making use of strong international relations for technological advancements.
The new Falcon Arabic model is TII’s first dedicated Arab language AI, which focuses on a severe gap in the rapidly changing AI sector. Trained on a high-quality and native Arabic database ranging from Modern Standard Arabic and diverse regional dialects, Falcon aims to achieve the full linguistic diversity of the Arab world. The TII states that it surpasses all other local Arab language models. It matches the performance of models up to 10 times its size while solidifying the UAE’s leadership in multilingual AI.
Along with Falcon Arabic, TII also gave birth to the Falcon H1, a highly capable model made to refine efficiency and portability. Falcon even outperforms similar offerings from Meta’s LLaMA and Alibaba’s Qwen within the 30 billion-70 billion parameter category, reducing the computing strength and technical expertise required for advanced AI systems considerably. It supports over 100 languages and utilizes a hybrid architecture for swifter deduction times and lower memory consumption. It allows high-performance AI on state-of-the-art devices and in a low-resource setting.
The ATRC Secretary General, Faisal Al Bannai, stated that
"AI leadership is not about scale for the sake of scale. It is about making powerful tools useful, usable, and universal."
All Falcon models are open-source, which promotes responsible and ethical AI development and has caused over 55 million global downloads. This aggressive investment of the UAE in AI, along with the agreement with the US for access to advanced semiconductors, conveys its intent to be a major player in shaping the future of AI.
