The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is investing in AI.
On May 13th, the UAE government research institute announced a new open-source gen-AI model capable of competing with large technology companies.
The Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has launched the Falcon 2 series, which includes the text-based model Falcon 2 11B and the vision-to-language model Falcon 2 11B VLM, capable of generating text descriptions for uploaded images.
The Falcon 2 series was launched amid competition between companies and countries to develop their large language models following the 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
While some have chosen to keep AI code proprietary, the UAE’s Falcon and Meta’s LLaMA have made their code available for others to use.
Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council, who is also a strategic research and advanced technology advisor to the president, said, “The UAE is demonstrating that it can be a major player in AI.”
Al Bannai also expressed optimism about the performance of Falcon 2, stating that they are “working on the third generation Falcon.”
The UAE, a major oil exporter and influential country in the Middle East, has recently been investing heavily in AI.
UAE AI company G42 secured an investment of $1.5 billion from Microsoft, coordinated with Washington, after divesting its stake in a Chinese company and discarding Chinese hardware.
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