The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has released an open source Large Language Model (LLM). This model has higher performance than the prevailing LLM and is gaining popularity because it is totally free for industrial use.

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a member of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) of the UAE Abu Dhabi government, opened the LLM ‘Falcon 40B’ and seven.5B and 1.3B models for research and commercialization on the twenty fifth of last month. announced that it was made public.

On the thirty first, it announced that it might waive royalties for industrial and research use for comprehensive access in response to global demand. Traditionally, most LLMs have granted licenses only to non-commercial users, but TII emphasized that it has made the choice to supply unprecedented rights to researchers and industrial users.

This decision was made since the model is gaining popularity, akin to topping Hugging Face’s open source LLM rankings right after its release. Currently, the Falcon 40B is ahead of famous models akin to Meta’s ‘LLaMA’ series and Stability AI’s ‘Stable LM’.

Falcon 40B, because the name suggests, is an LLM with 40 billion parameters, reportedly trained with 1 trillion tokens. Particularly, it was introduced as a strength that it improved inference speed and efficiency by optimizing for inference.

TII revealed that the Falcon 40B’s supercomputing power used for training was 2800 PF (petaflops) per day, which is lower than half of the Meta ‘Rama 65B (6300 PF). As well as, in consequence of a test based on Stanford University’s benchmarking tool, it was introduced that it used only 75% of the computing power of Open AI ‘GPT-3’, 40% of Deep Mind ‘Chinchilla’, and 80% of Google ‘Palm-62B’.

“Compute power is pivotal in accelerating AI system training and enabling use cases quickly,” said Ray Johnson, TII CEO. We are going to support you to realize it,” he said.

As well as, with the discharge of the Falcon 40B, TII announced that it might receive project proposals using LLM from scientists and researchers world wide. The content is that supercomputing power for LLM utilization is provided by choosing projects that may construct or encourage outstanding use cases in areas akin to engineering, medical, ESG, and coding.

“Making the Falcon 40B open source demonstrates our commitment to spurring AI innovation,” said ATRC Secretary-General Faisal AI Bannai. will help,” he said.

This makes the UAE the fifth country to have an LLM after the US, China, Korea and Israel. As well as, within the ‘2023 Frontier Technology Readiness Index’ recently announced by the United Nations, it rose 5 places to thirty seventh, rising to the best position within the Arab world.

Reporter Lim Dae-jun ydj@aitimes.com