Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has released Falcon 2, an open-source, multilingual, and multimodal AI model series. Falcon 2 is available in two variants: Falcon 2 11B, and Falcon 2 11B VLM—a vision-to-language model.
The models support English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and various other languages. Falcon 2 11B VLM is TII's first multimodal model. This means it can analyze and understand images which opens up numerous applications across various sectors such as healthcare and education.
In terms of benchmarks, the new Falcon 2 11B model outperforms Meta's Llama 3 8B and performs on par with Google's Gemma 7B model, as verified by the Hugging Face leaderboard.
Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council, expressed pride in Falcon 2's performance, stating, "We're very proud that we can still punch way above our weight, really compete with the best players globally." He also mentioned that they are working on the next generation, "Falcon 3."
The UAE continues to make significant investments in artificial intelligence, and while these are not state-of-the-art models, they represent important progress for the region. TII says it plans to release a mixture-of-experts version of Falcon 2 to further improve accuracy and accelerate decision-making.