TII Releases New Open GenAI Model To Compete With Big Tech

Secretary General of the UAE Advanced Technology Research Council, Faisal Al Bannai (Photo: x @TI Merahae)

JAKARTA - The Government Research Institute in the United Arab Emirates on Monday 13 May released a new Open source GenAI model. This model is said to be able to compete with AI products from large technology companies.

The Institute of Innovation Technology Abu Dhabi (Technology Innovation Institute /TII) announced the release of the Falcon 2: Falcon 2 11B series, a text-based model, and Falcon 2 11B VLM, a vision-to-language model that can produce text descriptions of uploaded images.

TII is a research center at the Abu Dhabi Advanced Technology Research Council.

The United Arab Emirates, as a major oil exporter and one of the most influential powers of Middle Eastern technology, is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. But the gamble also caught the attention of US officials who last year issued an ultimatum: American or Chinese technology.

The UAE artificial intelligence company, G42, withdrew Chinese hardware and released shares in Chinese companies before obtaining a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft which was synchronized with Washington.

Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council, Faisal Al Bannai, who is also the president's adviser to strategic research and advanced technology, said that the UAE shows that they can become the main players in artificial intelligence.

The Falcon 2 series comes as companies and countries compete to develop their own big language models after OpenAI's release of the ChatGPT in 2022. While some companies choose to keep their artificial intelligence code private, others, such as Falcon UAE and Llama Meta, have made their code available to anyone who wants to use it.

Al Bannai said he was optimistic about Falcon 2's performance and that they were working on "the Falcon 3 generation".

"We are very proud that we can still compete with the best players globally," said Al Bannai.