TII New AI Models Falcon Arabic & H1 Launched
The UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) today announced two significant advancements in artificial intelligence with the launch of its TII new AI models: Falcon Arabic and Falcon-H1. Falcon Arabic marks the first Arabic language model in the acclaimed Falcon series, establishing itself as the region’s best-performing Arabic AI. Falcon-H1 introduces a groundbreaking architectural design, redefining AI performance and portability for everyday devices.
This unveiling, made by H.E. Faisal Al Bannai at the Make it in the Emirates event, signals TII’s continued leadership in developing accessible and powerful AI solutions. These innovations promise to expand AI capabilities across diverse applications and resource settings.
Falcon Arabic: A Breakthrough Among TII’s New AI Models
Falcon Arabic, one of the prominent TII new AI models, represents a major leap for Arabic language AI. Built upon the Falcon 3-7B (7-billion-parameter) architecture, it is one of the most sophisticated Arabic AI models developed to date. TII trained Falcon Arabic on a high-quality, native Arabic dataset. This dataset encompasses Modern Standard Arabic and various regional dialects, capturing the rich linguistic diversity of the Arab world.
According to the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard benchmarks, Falcon Arabic surpasses all other regionally available Arabic language models. It ranks as the best-performing Arabic model in its class, impressively matching the performance of models up to ten times its size. This demonstrates how intelligent architecture can overcome sheer scale. H.E. Faisal Al Bannai expressed pride, stating, “We’re proud to finally bring Arabic to Falcon, and prouder still that the best-performing large language model in the Arab world was built in the UAE.”
Introducing Falcon-H1: High-Performance Portable AI from TII
The second of the TII new AI models launched is Falcon-H1, engineered to dramatically broaden access to high-performance AI. It achieves this by significantly reducing the computing power and technical expertise traditionally needed to run advanced AI systems. In the small-to-medium size category (30 to 70 billion parameters), Falcon-H1 outperforms comparable offerings like Meta’s LLaMA and Alibaba’s Qwen. This enables practical, real-world AI applications on everyday devices and in environments with limited resources.
This launch builds on the success of TII’s Falcon 3 series, which was recognized for its ability to operate on a single graphics processing unit (GPU). Commenting on Falcon-H1, H.E. Faisal Al Bannai remarked, “Today, AI leadership is not about scale for the sake of scale. It is about making powerful tools useful, usable, and universal. Falcon-H1 reflects our commitment to delivering AI that works for everyone – not just the few.”
Technical Innovations in TII’s Latest AI Model Suite
Falcon-H1, a key part of the TII new AI models suite, features a hybrid architecture (named ‘H’) combining the strengths of Transformers and Mamba. This innovative design enables significantly faster inference speeds and lower memory consumption while maintaining high performance across various benchmarks. Falcon-H1 also supports European-origin languages and, for the first time, has scalable capability for over 100 languages, thanks to a multilingual tokenizer trained on diverse datasets.
Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII, stated, “We approached Falcon-H1 not just as a research milestone but as an engineering challenge: how to deliver exceptional efficiency without compromise.” The Falcon-H1 family includes models of various sizes: 34B, 7B, 3B, 1.5B, 1.5B-deep, and 500M. This range offers users diverse performance-to-efficiency ratios. The flagship 34B model notably outperforms similar models from competitors on complex tasks. Dr. Hakim Hacid, Chief Researcher at TII, added, “This fundamentally shifts what’s possible at the smallest scale, enabling powerful AI on edge devices.”
Global Impact and Accessibility of TII’s New AI Models
The Falcon models, including these TII new AI models, are already making a global impact. In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Falcon technology has supported AgriLLM, a solution aiding farmers in challenging climate conditions. The Falcon ecosystem has garnered over 55 million downloads globally, recognized as the Middle East’s most powerful open AI model family.
TII focuses on building foundational models adaptable for industry, research, and public good, prioritizing accessibility and resource efficiency. All Falcon models, including Falcon Arabic and Falcon-H1, are open source. They are available on [Hugging Face] and FalconLLM.TII.ae under the TII Falcon License, an Apache 2.0-based license promoting responsible AI development. Learn more about TII’s other research initiativesTII’s Falcon ].
Conclusion: Pioneering Accessible and Powerful AI
The launch of Falcon Arabic and Falcon-H1 underscores TII’s commitment to advancing the AI landscape. These TII new AI models not only push the boundaries of performance and linguistic capability but also make powerful AI tools more accessible and usable for a global audience. This continues TII’s mission to foster innovation and drive real-world AI applications.
Explore the potential of Falcon Arabic and Falcon-H1 for your own AI projects and discover the future of AI with TII.
