A government research institute in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) released a new open-source GenAI model on Monday. This model could rival those from major technology companies.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) introduced the Falcon 2 series. This includes Falcon 2 11B, a text-based model, and Falcon 2 11B VLM, a vision-to-language model generating text descriptions of images.
TII operates under Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council. The UAE, a major oil exporter and influential Middle East power, heavily invests in artificial intelligence. This focus has drawn scrutiny from US officials, who issued an injunction last year: choose American or Chinese technology.
Emirati AI firm G42 removed Chinese hardware and divested stakes in Chinese companies. This move, coordinated with Washington, helped secure a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft.
Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council, emphasized the UAE’s ambition in AI. He noted that the Falcon 2 series positions the UAE as a major player in artificial intelligence.
The Falcon 2 series launch comes as companies and countries race to develop large language models. Following the 2022 release of ChatGPT by OpenAI, some have kept their AI code proprietary. Others, like UAE’s Falcon and Meta’s Llama, have made their code publicly available.
Al Bannai expressed optimism about Falcon 2’s performance and mentioned ongoing work on the “Falcon 3 generation. “We’re very proud that we can still punch way above our weight and really compete with the best players globally,” he said.
 has released the Falcon 2 series, an open source GenAI model. This includes text-based and vision-to-language models, aiming to compete with major technology companies.){kind=link}