UAE's Technology Innovation Institute Releases Falcon 2

May 16, 2024

The Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has released the Falcon 2 series, which includes text-based and vision-to-language models that can generate text descriptions from uploaded images. This development comes as countries and companies are racing to create their own large language models following the release of ChatGPT. The UAE is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, with Emirati AI firm G42 securing a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft after divesting stakes in Chinese companies. This move has drawn scrutiny from US officials who have issued an ultimatum: American or Chinese technology. The Falcon 2 series’ code will be publicly available for anyone to use, unlike some other AI models that remain proprietary. TII’s Secretary General Faisal Al Bannai is optimistic about the performance of Falcon 2 and is working on the next generation, Falcon 3.