Technology Innovation Institute's Falcon 3: A New Era In Open Source AI Models

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 18 (Bernama) -- The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a global applied research centre under Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has unveiled Falcon 3, the latest iteration of its open-source large language model (LLM) series.

This groundbreaking release sets a new benchmark for small LLMs and democratises access to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) by enabling the model to operate efficiently on light infrastructures, including laptops.

Falcon 3 introduces superior reasoning and enhanced fine-tuning capabilities, making it a more powerful and usable AI model, according to a statement.

TII Chief Executive Officer, Dr Najwa Aaraj said: “Our dedication to pioneering research and attracting top-tier talent has culminated in the development of Falcon 3. The result is a model that exemplifies our pursuit of scientific excellence, offering enhanced efficiency and setting new benchmarks in AI technology.”

Meanwhile, ATRC Secretary General and Adviser to the United Arab Emirates President for Strategic Research and Advanced Technology Affairs, Faisal Al Bannai said this launch builds upon the foundation it established with Falcon 2, marking a significant step toward a new generation of AI models.

Falcon 3, trained on 14 trillion tokens—more than double its predecessor's of 5.5 trillion—demonstrates superior performance across benchmarks. It ranks among the top models globally that can run on a single GPU and claimed the number one spot on Hugging Face's third-party LLM leaderboard. The Falcon 3-10B model leads its category, outperforming all models under 13 billion parameters.

The Falcon 3 series includes four model sizes, namely Falcon3-1B, -3B, -7B and -10B, designed for seamless integration with widely used application programming interfaces (APIs) and libraries, making it user-friendly and adaptable for reasoning, language understanding, instruction following, code generation, and mathematical tasks.

The models come in both Base and Instruct variations. The Base model allows general-purpose generative tasks, whereas the Instruct model is a fine-tuned variant for conversational applications. Available in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, Falcon 3 models also have quantised versions for optimised integration as well as rapid deployment and inference.

Falcon 3 is available for download, with a testing environment called Falcon Playground for users to explore and provide feedback. Licenced under the TII Falcon License, Falcon 3 promotes the responsible use of AI through a permissive Apache 2.0-based licence.

Early January 2025, the Falcon 3 Family of models will introduce new members with an emphasis on multimodal functionalities—including text, images, video, and voice mode.

-- BERNAMA