Abu Dhabi introduces Falcon Arabic to compete in AI race

Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has launched Falcon Arabic, a powerful new Arabic-based large language model, as the UAE vies to stay in the consumer AI race.

The new LLM is trained across both Modern Standard Arabic and dialects, and TII claims that it matches the performance of models up to 10 times its size, Bloomberg reports.

The U.S. and China are increasingly dominating the competition to develop the world’s most powerful AI models, leaving countries like the UAE fighting to keep up.

Earlier this month, it was reported that TII’s flagship Falcon model had fallen behind in the rankings and user adoption, while G42, which backed another system called Jais, had shifted focus to customizing models from companies like OpenAI instead of developing its own.