DUBAI: A government research institute in the United Arab Emirates on Monday released a fresh open-source GenAI model that could compete with those of huge tech companies. The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi announced that it is 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 textual description of the transmitted image. TII is a research center of the Abu Dhabi Advanced Technology Research Council. The United Arab Emirates, a major oil exporter and an influential power in the Middle East, is making huge investments in artificial intelligence. But that bet also drew interest from U.S. officials, who last year issued an ultimatum: American or Chinese technology.
Emirati AI company G42 delisted Chinese equipment and divested stakes in Chinese companies before securing a $1.5 billion investment for Microsoft, coordinated with Washington. Secretary-General of the High-Tech Research Council Faisal Al Bannai, who is also presidential adviser on strategic research and advanced technology, said the UAE has shown it can be a major player in artificial intelligence.
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The Falcon 2 series comes as companies and countries race to develop their immense language models following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022. While some have chosen to keep their AI code proprietary, others, such as Falcon from the United Arab Emirates and Llama from Meta, have made their code public and anyone can operate it. Al Bannai said he is bullish about the Falcon 2’s performance and that they are working on a “3rd generation Falcon.”
“We’re very proud that we can still punch well above our weight and really compete with the best players in the world,” he said.
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