The latest iteration of the Falcon family of AI models was unveiled this week, and brings enhanced reasoning and fine-tuning capabilities, providing open source developers with access to a powerful new system.
Falcon 3 was trained on 14 trillion tokens — more than double its predecessor’s 5.5 trillion — and surpasses rival-sized models on several industry-standard benchmark tests, including the challenging multi-task understanding dataset, MMLU-Pro.
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“Our dedication to pioneering research and attracting top-tier talent has culminated in the development of Falcon 3,” said Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII. “The result is a model that exemplifies our pursuit of scientific excellence, offering enhanced efficiency and setting new benchmarks in AI technology.”
Falcon 3 comes in four model sizes: one billion parameters, three billion parameters, seven billion parameters, and 10 billion — with the smaller models available as base versions of as Instruct version, designed to better follow prompted instructions.
Able to handle inputs in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, Falcon 3 is designed to be resource-efficient and lightweight, enabling users to rapidly deploy and inference the new models.
The models are so small in cases they can even run on some laptops without sacrificing performance, enabling individual developers to access powerful open source systems previously reserved for higher-end industrial computing.
Where to access Falcon 3?
Developers can download Falcon 3 directly from Hugging Face or TII’s website.
The models are available under the TII Falcon License, a permissive Apache 2.0-based software licence enabling anyone to use the model to build and power applications so long as they adhere to using the AI models responsibly.
TII has also unveiled the Falcon Playground, a testing environment where end-users, programmers, and researchers can explore the new models. Users can also try out Falcon 3 via TII’s Falcon Chat feature.
Falcon 3 set for multimodality in 2025
Since its initial Falcon release back in March 2023, TII has sought to take on open source AI powerhouses like Meta from its home in the Middle East.
The research centre is the applied pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) and has quickly become one of the top labs building open source AI systems in the world.
Dr. Hakim Hacid, chief researcher of TII’s AI and Digital Science Research Centre (AIDRC): “AI is fast evolving, and we are glad to be an active part of this journey. Falcon 3 pushes the boundaries of small LLMs further, contributing to the open-source community by providing access to a better-performing AI.
“We are confident that this latest release will open an unlimited range of opportunities and will have tremendous benefits, empowering businesses and individuals to use AI in ways that were previously out of reach.”
TII shows no signs of slowing, with plans to add new Falcon 3 models in early January 2025 — with the new systems set to focus on multimodal functionalities, including text, images, video, and voice.
TII has previously put research into expanding what its Falcon models can do, with a specialist version of Falcon 2, Falcon 2 11B VLM, capable of handling both images and text.
Faisal Al Bannai, secretary general of ATRC and adviser to the UAE President for strategic research and advanced technology affairs, said: “The transformative power of AI is undeniable. Today, we advance our contributions to the AI community, particularly the open-source sector, with the release of the Falcon 3 family of text models.
“This launch builds upon the foundation we established with Falcon 2, marking a significant step toward a new generation of AI models. Our ongoing commitment to ensuring these powerful tools remain accessible to everyone, everywhere, reflects our dedication to global equity and inclusive innovation.”
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