Abu Dhabi Makes AI Model Falcon 40B As Open Source

The emirate of Abu Dhabi is making a large-scale artificial intelligence model known as "Falcon 40B" open source for research and commercial use, according to the government's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC).

ATRC's commercial investment arm, VentureOne, stated that it would also back viable ideas generated by the model.

Falcon 40B is a foundational large language model (LLM) with 40 billion parameters and trained on one trillion tokens developed by ATRC's Technology Innovation Institute (TII).

The technologies that power applications like OpenAI's bot ChatGPT are known as generative AI models.

"TII is providing access to the model's weights as part of a more comprehensive open-source package," according to ATRC. "While the majority of LLMs have only granted non-commercial users exclusive licences, TII has made a significant step forward by providing researchers and commercial users with access to the Falcon 40B LLM."

The capital of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates, is Abu Dhabi. The Abu Dhabi government has rapidly developed its technology industry in recent years, including the establishment of the G42 AI and cloud computing company and the EDGE defence technology group.

"We wanted to contribute to the community, to accelerate the use of AI," said ATRC Secretary General Faisal Al Bannai. Bannai is also the chairman of EDGE.

A TII director, Ebtesam Almazrouei, stated that they want to support generative AI use not only in chatbots but also in engineering, healthcare, suitability, and coding.

As companies around the world race to bring AI products to market in recent months, concerns have grown about how the technology could lead to privacy violations, scams, and misinformation campaigns.

"Deploying these platforms on their own parameters, to train, means we don't have access to the data going into these platforms," Bannai explained when asked about privacy concerns with the Falcon model.