On July 6, 2023, in Shanghai, China, an AI (Artificial Intelligence) sign is visible at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).
A new open source GenAI model, which may compete with those from major tech corporations, was unveiled on Monday by a government research institute in the United Arab Emirates.
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi announced the launch of the Falcon 2 series, which includes the text-based Falcon 2 11B model and the vision-to-language Falcon 2 11B VLM model, which can provide a text description of an uploaded image.
The Advanced Technology Research Council of Abu Dhabi houses the research centre TII.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), a significant oil exporter and powerful nation in the Middle East, is heavily investing in AI. However, American officials have also expressed concern about that wager. A year ago, they issued a challenge: use Chinese or American technology.
After removing Chinese hardware and selling holdings in Chinese businesses, the Emirati AI startup G42 was able to secure a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft through a diplomatic process with the Chinese government.
The United Arab Emirates is proving it can be a significant participant in artificial intelligence, according to Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council Faisal Al Bannai, who also advises the president on strategic research and advanced technology.
The Falcon 2 series comes as nations and businesses scramble to create their own massive language models in the wake of OpenAI’s 2022 release of ChatGPT. Some AI developers, like Falcon from the United Arab Emirates and Llama from Meta, have chosen to keep their code confidential, but others have opened it up for public use.
Al Bannai stated that they were developing “Falcon 3 generation” and expressed optimism on Falcon 2’s performance.
He remarked, “We’re very proud that we can still compete with the best players in the world and punch way above our weight.”
 sign is visible at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).){kind=link}