Latest news with #HakimHacid
Al Etihad
12-06-2025
- Business
- Al Etihad
Falcon-H1 language model to be offered as NVIDIA NIM Microservice
12 June 2025 19:17 ABU DHABI (ALETIHAD) The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a leading global research centre headquartered in Abu Dhabi, has announced that its next-generation open-source language model, Falcon-H1, will be available as a NVIDIA Inference Microservice (NIM), a move that significantly enhances the model's enterprise deployment in parallel with NVIDIA's GTC showcase in Paris, the initiative positions Falcon-H1 for immediate integration across cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments, a statement from TII said. The availability of Falcon-H1 on NIM will enable developers to deploy it with production-grade performance, bypassing the need for complex infrastructure customisation.'Falcon-H1's availability on NVIDIA NIM reflects our ongoing leadership in shaping the future of open, sovereign, and cross-domain deployment-ready AI. It demonstrates that breakthrough innovation from our region is not only competitive on the global stage – it's setting new benchmarks for scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready AI,' said Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of is built on an innovative hybrid Transformer–Mamba architecture, blending the efficiency of state space models (SSMs) with the advanced reasoning power of Transformer networks. This design supports context windows of up to 256,000 tokens, enabling long-context reasoning and high-speed inference with reduced memory overhead. Its multilingual design ensures competitive performance across both high- and low-resource to Dr. Hakim Hacid, Chief AI Researcher at TII, 'Falcon-H1's availability on NVIDIA NIM bridges the gap between cutting-edge model design and real-world operability. It combines our hybrid architecture with the performance and reliability of NVIDIA microservices. Developers can integrate Falcon-H1 optimised for long-context reasoning, multilingual versatility, and real-world applications. What once required weeks of infrastructure tuning becomes achievable in minutes at scale, with multilingual depth, and production resilience.'The integration with NVIDIA's NeMo microservices and AI Blueprints adds full lifecycle tooling for tasks such as data curation, safety guardrails, and post-deployment optimisation. This makes Falcon-H1 a fit for regulated and latency-sensitive AI deployments, further enhancing its credentials as a sovereign AI solution. With over 55 million downloads, the Falcon model family is among the most widely adopted open-source AI efforts from the Middle East. TII's alignment with NVIDIA's enterprise-grade deployment frameworks affirms Falcon-H1's status as a production-ready, sovereign AI alternative to proprietary systems.
Mid East Info
11-06-2025
- Business
- Mid East Info
Technology Innovation Institute Announces Falcon-H1 model availability as NVIDIA NIM to Deliver Sovereign AI at Scale
Flagship, top ranking, open-source AI model to be production-ready via new NVIDIA NIM microservices that deliver enterprise-ready inference for thousands of LLMs Paris, France – Abu Dhabi, UAE – June 2025: Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a leading global research center and the developer behind the globally ranked Falcon open-source AI models and privacy-preserving technologies, today announced that Falcon-H1, its next-generation, hybrid-architecture large language model, will be available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice. The announcement, timed with NVIDIA's GTC Paris showcase, positions Falcon-H1 for seamless enterprise deployment across cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments. Developers can soon access and scale Falcon-H1 with production-grade performance, without the engineering overhead typically required to adapt open-source models for real-world application. Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII, commented: 'Falcon-H1's availability on NVIDIA NIM reflects our ongoing leadership in shaping the future of open, sovereign, and cross-domain deployment ready AI. It demonstrates that breakthrough innovation from our region is not only competitive on the global stage – it's setting new benchmarks for scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready AI.' At the heart of Falcon-H1 is a novel hybrid Transformer–Mamba architecture, combining the efficiency of state space models (SSMs) with the expressiveness of Transformer networks. Designed in-house by TII researchers, the architecture supports context windows of up to 256k tokens, an order-of-magnitude leap in long-context reasoning, while preserving high-speed inference and reduced memory demands. Multilingual by design, Falcon-H1 delivers robust performance ahead of models in its category, across both high- and low-resource languages, making it suited for global-scale applications. Supported soon for deployment via the universal LLM NIM microservice, Falcon-H1 becomes a plug-and-play asset for enterprises building agentic systems, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows, or domain-specific assistants. Whether running with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, or SGLang, NIM abstracts away the underlying inference stack, enabling developers to deploy Falcon-H1 in minutes using standard tools such as Docker and Hugging Face, with automated hardware optimization and enterprise-grade SLAs. 'Falcon-H1's availability on NVIDIA NIM bridges the gap between cutting-edge model design and real-world operability. It combines our hybrid architecture with the performance and reliability of NVIDIA microservices. Developers can integrate Falcon-H1 optimized for long-context reasoning, multilingual versatility, and real-world applications. What once required weeks of infrastructure tuning becomes achievable in minutes at scale, with multilingual depth, and production resilience', said Dr. Hakim Hacid, Chief AI Researcher at TII. The release also mark Falcon-H1's integration with NVIDIA NeMo microservices and NVIDIA AI Blueprints, giving developers access to full lifecycle tooling, from data curation and guardrailing to continuous evaluation and post-deployment tuning. Crucially, this makes Falcon-H1 viable in regulated, latency-sensitive and sovereign AI contexts, with full-stack NVIDIA support. With over 55 million downloads to date, the Falcon series has become one of the most widely adopted open-source models from the Middle East region. Beyond its scale, Falcon-H1 smaller variants routinely outperform larger peers on reasoning and mathematical tasks, while the 34B model now leads several industry benchmarks. TII's strategic alignment with NVIDIA's validated deployment framework reflects that open-source models are production-ready assets. Falcon-H1's availability on NIM cements its place among them as a sovereign, scalable, and secure alternative to closed-weight incumbents. About the Technology Innovation Institute: The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) is the dedicated applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). TII is a pioneering global research and development center that focuses on applied research and new-age technology capabilities. The Institute has 10 dedicated research centers in advanced materials, autonomous robotics, cryptography, AI and digital science, directed energy, quantum, secure systems, propulsion and space, biotechnology, and renewable and sustainable energy. By working with exceptional talent, universities, research institutions, and industry partners from all over the world, TII connects an intellectual community and contributes to building an R&D ecosystem that reinforces the status of Abu Dhabi and the UAE as a global hub for innovation.
The National
24-04-2025
- Business
- The National
UAE expert warns of urgent need for reskilling as next-generation AI threatens to replace traditional jobs
A new generation of powerful artificial intelligence tools is set to transform the workplace, prompting urgent calls for workers to develop the way they carry out their jobs or risk being left behind. Speaking at Dubai AI Week on Thursday, leading researchers and technologists warned that AI 2.0 - the next wave of intelligent systems – is advancing so quickly that many traditional roles could soon become obsolete if employees and educators do not act now. 'There is a need for transformation and I think we need to start from now,' said Dr Hakim Hacid, chief researcher at the Artificial Intelligence and Digital Science Research Centre at the UAE's Technology Innovation Institute. 'Maybe we will not lose a lot of jobs right now, but there is a wave that is coming, and people should prepare themselves to do things that are more on how to use AI to increase their expertise, how to understand AI better and how to bring AI to their workplace to generate value. 'University programmes need to be reviewed and updated, depending on the needs of the industry.' AI 2.0 refers to a new era of AI in which systems are not only able to generate human-like responses but can also write code, reason and learn autonomously. This includes tools that can complete full software projects, diagnose illnesses and even function as personal tutors. Technology as such is already on the rise, including OpenAI's GPT-4, Google's Gemini and GitHub Copilot, which can write, debug and test computer code with minimal human input. Dr Hacid said although the threat to jobs may not be immediate, developers and IT professionals could be among the first to feel the pressure. 'I think AI is definitely becoming much more powerful, and the intelligence that we have in AI will allow us to probably work in a more efficient way where we do not necessarily need the amount of people that we are using today,' he said. 'I think there will be few things that will probably disappear. The first ones that will start feeling the heat would be probably people like developers and the programmers we see today.' He believes, however, that not all developers would be replaced. 'Elite developers will still be needed ... coming up with new ideas – that's something AI is not capable of yet,' he said. Beyond software development, Dr Hacid said any job that involves repetitive tasks was likely to be automated, whether through software or the growing use of robotics. 'Many tasks will be automated now or maybe down the road in two years,' he said. 'The expectation is just a transformation of the expertise and what people are expected to do.' Prof Keith Ross, a computer scientist at NYU Abu Dhabi, said the shift was no longer about technology capability but about how willing society is to accept the changes. 'There was a recent study involving very complicated medical cases. General practitioners gave their diagnosis and ChatGPT did the same. ChatGPT outperformed the doctors,' he said. 'What that's telling me is that we could have AI doctors right now. What's preventing is not a technology nor a business problem. It's more of a regulatory and society problem of allowing this kind of thing to happen.' For Lloyed Lobo, co-founder of fintech company the more serious concern is that the current education system is not preparing children for a future shaped by advanced AI. 'This system primes us for obedience – follow the path, do what you're told,' he said. 'But now, AI is getting better at doing the exact things we were trained for.' Mr Lobo said that when he worked in logistics in the late 2000s, he helped replace hundreds of warehouse jobs with robots. 'That was 15 years ago. Now AI can think and reason. By the time someone finishes a course [online], AI may have already mastered that job,' he said. He is now experimenting with new education models through his children. They attend Alpha School, a physical school that integrates an AI tutor. 'The AI adapts to the student and teaches them twice as fast,' he said. "You could be in Grade 1 but learn at a Grade 5 level. It moves at the pace of the learner.' The remainder of the school day focuses on social skills, communication and creativity - abilities Mr Lobo believes will be in high demand in a world where AI handles the execution. The panellists agreed that while certain jobs may vanish, many others will simply evolve, requiring workers to learn how to collaborate with AI rather than compete against it. 'There will be jobs but the nature of work is changing. We're moving from a place where the employee has everything in mind to do their job, to something that's more collaborative with AI - understanding it, guiding it and using it to generate value,' said Dr Hacid.
