UAE Releases Falcon Arabic AI Model To Outcompete Mideast Rivals

(Bloomberg) -- A research arm of the Abu Dhabi government has released a powerful new Arabic-language artificial intelligence model in a bid to preserve its technological lead over rivals in the Middle East. 

The new system, called Falcon Arabic, was trained on a dataset spanning Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects. The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the Abu Dhabi group behind Falcon, claims the new offering matches the performance of models up to 10 times its size. TII also launched Falcon H1, a small model that it said outperforms similarly sized options from Meta Platforms Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

In the Middle East, as in other markets, companies have been rethinking whether the significant cost of building cutting-edge AI models from scratch is worthwhile. The new Falcon releases signal the United Arab Emirates is vying to stay in the AI race.

While Falcon remains the leading offering from the UAE, it has struggled to keep up with advances from open-source alternatives from Meta and China’s DeepSeek. In 2023, TII touted the AI system’s first-place ranking in open-source models on Hugging Face, a closely-watched barometer for the industry. As of last month, Falcon did not rank in the top 500 on the platform’s leaderboard, Bloomberg News previously reported. Its user numbers also lag far behind Meta and other rivals. 

The UAE has pushed ahead with other ways to get into the current AI boom beyond model development. G42, an Emirati tech conglomerate, recently announced plans to build a 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi, along with several US firms. MGX, an investment fund co-formed by G42, partnered with Nvidia Corp. and French firms to establish what they say will be Europe’s largest AI data center campus. MGX has also backed US AI developers OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI.

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