Abu Dhabi Emirate Opens Source Of Falcon 40B Artificial Intelligence Model For Commercial Research And Use

Secretary General of ATRC, Faisal Al Bannai. (photo: twitter @atrcuae)

JAKARTA - The government of the Abu Dhabi Emirates has announced that it will provide a large-scale artificial intelligence model called "Falcon 40B" as an open source for research and commercial purposes. The Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the government research institute Abu Dhabi, announced this step on Thursday, May 26.

VentureOne, ATRC's commercial investment arm, will also support viable ideas emerging from the use of this model.

Falcon 40B is a fundamental large language model with 40 billion parameters and is trained using one trillion tokens. The model was developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a research center under ATRC.

"TII provides access to the weight of this model as a more comprehensive open-source package," ATRC said. "While most major language models provide exclusive licenses only to non-commercial users, TII has taken important steps by offering researchers and commercial users access to Falcon 40B LLM."

Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates, a federation consisting of seven emirates. The Abu Dhabi government has rapidly developed their tech industry in recent years, including establishing an artificial intelligence and computing company G42 AI clouds as well as defense technology group EDGE.

"We want to contribute to the community to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence," ATRC Secretary-General Faisal Al Bannai told Reuters. Bannai also serves as chairman of EDGE.

Ebtesam Almazrouei, a TII director, said they wanted to support the use of generative artificial intelligence not only in chatbots, but also in engineering, health, customization, and programming.

Along with companies around the world vying to launch artificial intelligence products in recent months, concerns are growing about how this technology could lead to breaches of privacy, fraud, and misinformation campaigns.

"The placement of these platforms with their own parameters, to be trained, means we don't have access to data that goes into those platforms," Bannai said when asked about privacy concerns regarding the Falcon model.