Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has appointed Dr. Hakim Hacid as Chief Researcher of its AI and Digital Science Research Center (AIDRC), the home of the Falcon LLM series. Dr. Hacid previously served as Executive Director and Acting Chief Researcher at TII, after joining in 2022 from Zayed University. He brings expertise in AI, ML, data science, and information retrieval, with prior experience at Bell Labs and Macquarie University. Why it matters: The appointment strengthens TII's leadership in AI research and development, particularly for the Falcon series of open-source LLMs that have gained global recognition.
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi has launched Falcon LLM, a 40 billion parameter large language model (LLM). Developed by the AI and Digital Science Research Center (AIDRC), Falcon LLM outperforms GPT-3 while using less training compute. The model was trained on one trillion tokens and will impact fields like education and healthcare. Why it matters: This release establishes the UAE as a major player in generative AI and supports the nation's AI strategy.
Dr. Najwa Aaraj has been appointed as the new CEO of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), succeeding Dr. Ray O. Johnson. Dr. Aaraj previously served as Chief Researcher at TII's Cryptography Research Center (CRC) and the Autonomous Robotics Research Center (ARRC). TII has 10 research centers specializing in fields like AI, robotics, and quantum technology and is known for the Falcon LLM series. Why it matters: This appointment signals a continued focus on R&D and innovation in Abu Dhabi, reinforcing the UAE's position as a global hub for advanced technology research.
Technology Innovation Institute (TII) will make its Falcon-H1 large language model available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice. Falcon-H1 features a hybrid Transformer–Mamba architecture supporting context windows of up to 256k tokens. The model's availability on NVIDIA NIM aims to provide enterprises with a plug-and-play asset for building AI systems. Why it matters: This integration will simplify deployment and scaling of Falcon-H1 for enterprises, potentially accelerating the adoption of sovereign AI solutions in the region.
Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in the UAE has launched Falcon 180B, an open access large language model with 180 billion parameters trained on 3.5 trillion tokens. Falcon 180B ranks first on the Hugging Face Leaderboard for pretrained LLMs, outperforming Meta's LLaMA 2 and nearing the performance of OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's PaLM 2. The model is available for research and commercial use under the 'Falcon 180B TII License', based upon Apache 2.0. Why it matters: This release strengthens the UAE's position in AI development and promotes open access to advanced AI technology, fostering innovation and collaboration.