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UAE's ChatGPT rival launched in Abu Dhabi with 40 billion parameters

The large language model can be used to create chatbots, virtual assistants, and for language translation, content generation, and sentiment analysis

The UAE now has it's very own home-built rival to ChatGPT.

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has launched 'Falcon LLM,' a foundational large language model (LLM) with 40 billion parameters - which outperforms ChatGPT3.

AI and Digital Science Research Center’s (AIDRC) AI Cross-Center Unit, the team behind building Noor, the world’s largest Arabic language model, built Falcon LLM, which is trained on one trillion tokens.

The model uses only 75 per cent of GPT-3’s training compute, 40 per cent of Chinchilla’s, and 80 per cent of PaLM-62B’s.

Today, the recent advancements in large language models have demonstrated their ability to generate creative text, solve complex problems, and offer significant benefits to billions of people. LLMs can be used in a wide range of applications, such as chatbots, virtual assistants, language translation, content generation, and sentiment analysis.

They can help businesses to streamline their customer service operations by providing efficient and effective responses to customer inquiries. This deep tech is allowing companies and countries to garner huge savings – from improving efficiencies to cutting down labour costs and identifying new revenue streams – simply with its implementation in businesses or departments. Further, on-premises LLMs are ideal for organisations requiring real-time processing and managing confidential or proprietary data. This is critical for safeguarding data privacy to maintain competitive advantage.

Speaking about this LLM breakthrough, Dr. Ray O. Johnson, CEO, of TII said: “The year 2023 is turning out to be the year of AI. Falcon LLM is a landmark announcement for us, but this is just the beginning. By the end of the year, we will be sharing news on a huge increase in capabilities in this space. “We understand that this is the start of a momentous journey,” Johnson continued, “we will press on to give this region its own AI success stories, well-aligned with the UAE’s National AI Strategy.”

Prof. Mérouane Debbah, Chief Researcher, AI and Digital Science Research Center, said: “We are thrilled to advance the world’s understanding of the power and benefits of these LLMs which will have an important impact in various fields such as education, healthcare, film production, and CGI. As the country continues to develop and diversify its economy, this is an important milestone in the field. Falcon LLM model is just the start of a new journey.”

Dr. Ebtesam Almazroui, Director, AI Cross-Center Unit at AIDRC, and project lead of LLMs who plays a pivotal role to build LLMs and step up the UAE’s capability in this space, said: “This achievement serves as a testament to the UAE's forward-thinking approach and the importance it places on innovation and technology. The development of this model is part of our journey towards realizing the country's economic vision and strategic plan "We the UAE 2031".

“We are thrilled to announce the ground-breaking achievement of our Falcon LLM 40B model which significantly outperform models like BLOOM and GPT-3, even at a fraction of the size. Thanks to state-of-the-art data pipeline, Falcon LLM also improves upon new-generation models. For instance, it matches the performance of Chinchilla (from DeepMind) and PaLM-62B (from Google), at considerably lower training costs in comparison."

"Falcon LLM is trained on scaling laws from Hoffmann, et al, and the model was kept relatively modest in size with unprecedented data quality. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to the entire team for their tireless efforts in this ground-breaking endeavor. With Falcon LLM 40B as our flagship LLM model, we are confident that the UAE will continue to lead the way in the knowledge economy, driving progress and prosperity.”