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The Falcon has been released amongst the pigeons? The Falcon-40B

 


Monopolies like to retain their position. So it makes sense if a trio of monopolistic tech companies call on the legislators of the world to demand that all LLMs be subject to a license, especially when such license's may restrict competitors introducing cheaper, more efficient models into the opensource community. 

So let's talk about Falcon-40B. No paper exists for this yet (it states on hugging face that a paper is coming soon). There are many things that make Falcón of interest, one is that it has been built by TII, the Technology Innovation Institute, that are 'part of Abu Dhabi Government’s Advanced Technology Research Council, which oversees technology research in the emirate. As a disruptor in science, we are setting new standards and serve as a catalyst for change.' So not another US company. 

The company's website is informative:

'Falcon, first unveiled in March 2023, showcased exceptional performance and underscored the UAE's commitment to technological progress. Based on Stanford University’s HELM LLM benchmarking tool, Falcon 40B outperformed its renowned counterparts in utilizing significantly less training compute power. With only 75 percent of the training compute of OpenAI's GPT-3, 40 percent of DeepMind's Chinchilla AI, and 80 percent of the training compute of Google's PaLM-62B, the tool substantiated TII's commitment to advancing developments in generative AI.'

'Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei Director, AI Cross-Center Unit, TII, said: “The open-source release of Falcon 40B, 7.5B, and 1.3B parameter AI models and our high-quality REFINEDWEB dataset, exemplifies the profound scientific contributions of the UAE. With each breakthrough, we defy limitations, reshape the realm of possibilities, and pave the way for collaborative efforts with transformative impact."

The licensing of this model is of interest to. It's released via an Apache 2 license, it's open for commercial usage, up to the value of $1m, after which is subject to fees. The Falcon has been released amongst the pigeons. 

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