Recently, at the "Made in UAE" conference, the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi announced the launch of two new artificial intelligence large models: Falcon Arabic and Falcon H1. The release of these two models marks further development in the UAE's artificial intelligence sector, particularly in exploring the Arabic-speaking environment and the low-computational-power application market.
The name "Falcon" means "hawk," and it is an open-source large language model launched by TII in 2023. When first released on the AI open-source community Hugging Face, Falcon attracted significant attention. However, over time, its popularity has gradually decreased, with relatively fewer users, falling out of the top 500. Therefore, the new models launched by TII this time can be seen as a move to find differentiated competitive opportunities, especially in the Arabic-speaking context and lightweight artificial intelligence direction.
Falcon Arabic is the first large language model in the Falcon series dedicated to Arabic. It is built on the basis of Falcon3-7B, with training data covering Modern Standard Arabic and various local dialects, and has the ability to handle ultra-long contexts, supporting text inputs of 32K tokens or more. Meanwhile, Falcon H1 focuses more on the universality of the model and low-computational-power adaptability. It provides multiple versions with parameter scales ranging from 500M to 34B, aiming to offer feasible artificial intelligence solutions for scenarios with limited computational resources, emphasizing the balance between computational efficiency and deployment flexibility.
In addition to the development of large models, the UAE is actively participating in the global artificial intelligence development wave, focusing on infrastructure construction, cross-border technology cooperation, overseas investment, and other aspects of development. For example, OpenAI recently plans to collaborate with G42, an artificial intelligence company in Abu Dhabi, to build an artificial intelligence data center with a capacity of 5000 megawatts in Abu Dhabi. Additionally, the UAE investment company MGX also announced plans to cooperate with NVIDIA and French enterprises to build a large artificial intelligence base in Europe. Last week, during his visit to the Middle East, Trump reached a cooperation agreement with the Abu Dhabi Innovation Industry Alliance (ADIO), planning to establish a global artificial intelligence engineering center in Abu Dhabi.
Key Points:
🌍 The UAE has launched two new artificial intelligence large models, namely Falcon Arabic and Falcon H1, focusing on the Arabic-speaking and low-computational-power application markets.
📚 Falcon Arabic is the first large language model dedicated to Arabic, supporting the handling of ultra-long contexts.
🤝 The UAE is actively participating in the global artificial intelligence development, involving infrastructure construction and international cooperation.