UAE unveils most advanced Arabic-language model
22 May 2025 11:00
ABU DHABI (ALETIHAD)The UAE's Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has launched two major artificial intelligence models—Falcon Arabic, the region's most advanced Arabic-language AI model, and Falcon H1, a high-performance, low-footprint model designed for use on everyday devices and in limited-resource environments.Announced by Faisal Al Bannai, Advisor to the UAE President and Secretary General of ATRC, during his keynote at the Make it in the Emirates event, the launches mark a strategic move to consolidate the UAE's leadership in sovereign and accessible AI technologies.Falcon Arabic is the first Arabic model in the Falcon series and is trained on high-quality native Arabic data, covering both Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects. Based on the Falcon 3-7B architecture, it is the best-performing Arabic language model available in the Middle East, topping the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. Remarkably, it matches or exceeds the performance of models up to ten times its size—proving that smart architecture can outperform raw scale.'We're proud to finally bring Arabic to Falcon,' said Al Bannai. 'And prouder still that the best-performing large language model in the Arab world was built in the UAE.'Falcon H1 introduces a new hybrid architecture that combines the strengths of Transformers and Mamba technologies. With model sizes ranging from 500 million to 34 billion parameters, it is designed for a wide spectrum of real-world applications—from edge devices to large-scale enterprise deployments. The flagship 34B version outperforms equivalent models from Meta's LLaMA and Alibaba's Qwen in both performance and efficiency.'Today, AI leadership is not about scale for the sake of scale. It's about making powerful tools useful, usable, and universal,' Al Bannai said. 'Falcon H1 reflects our commitment to delivering AI that works for everyone—not just the few.'Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII, noted: 'We approached Falcon H1 not just as a research milestone but as an engineering challenge. This model is built for real-world utility, especially in settings where resources are limited but ambitions are high.'All Falcon models are open source and available on Hugging Face and FalconLLM.TII.ae under a permissive license promoting ethical AI use. TII says Falcon models have been downloaded more than 55 million times worldwide. They are already being used in real-world applications, including AgriLLM—a tool developed in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help farmers tackle climate challenges.
Falcon H1 supports more than 100 languages thanks to a newly designed multilingual tokenizer, broadening its global usability. It excels in tasks involving mathematics, reasoning, coding, long-context understanding, and multilingual comprehension.
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Source: Aletihad - Abu Dhabi
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