Meet TII’s Falcon 180B: the World’s Most Powerful Open Source LLM
The UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute has unveiled the newest iteration in its Falcon family of large language models. Currently at the top of the Hugging Face Leaderboard for pretrained LLMs, Falcon 180B is the largest LLM openly available for research and commercial use.
The Falcon 180B is the newest member in the TII’s Falcon family of language models. A scaled-up iteration of Falcon 40B, the Falcon 180B is currently at the top of the Hugging Face Leaderboard for pre-trained Open Large Language Models, and is available for research and commercial use. According to the TII, Falcon 180B outperforms competitors such as Meta's LLaMA 2 in a variety of tasks, including reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests. It also ranks highly in comparison to closed source models, with a performance comparable to Google’s PaLM 2 Large — the model behind Bard.
Falcon 180’s predecessor, Falcon 40B, also reached the top of the Hugging Face Leaderboard when launched in May 2023. Falcon 40B consists of 40 billion parameters and was trained on one trillion tokens. In comparison, Falcon 180B has 180 billion parameters, nearly five times as many as its predecessor, and was trained on an impressive 3.5 trillion tokens. Falcon 180B is also 2.5 larger than LLaMA 2 and was trained using four times more compute than LlaMA 2.
According to the Hugging Face blog, Falcon 180B was trained mostly on data from TII’s own RefinedWeb, with the addition to a mix of curated data that includes conversations, technical papers and some code.
Falcon 180B is freely available for downloading, hosting, using and integrating into applications through a royalty free license based on Apache 2.0, with restrictions against illegal and harmful use. A free demo can be found in this Space. The license does not cover sharing instances of Falcon 180B or its derivatives via managed services. Hosting providers interested in offering this kind of commercial services should contact TII to develop a dedicated service agreement.
Executive Director and Acting Chief Researcher of the AI Cross-Center Unit at TII, Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei, stated that Falcon 180B embodies TII’s continued commitment to being the frontrunners in the development of generative AI. He also mentioned that TII is “thrilled to share [Falcon 180B’s] limitless potential with the world”, since the Institute’s vision is about “nurturing a profound connection to address global challenges through collaborative breakthroughs.”
For more information on Falcon 180B and the Falcon family of LLMs, visit: https://falconllm.tii.ae/
