UAE’s advanced Falcon 180B available on Amazon SageMaker

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Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has made a groundbreaking advancement in artificial intelligence by making its Falcon 180B large language model available for deployment on Amazon's SageMaker JumpStart platform.

This industry milestone by TII, the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), was announced by Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company.

Falcon 180B is not only the largest openly available language models with 180 billion parameters, but it is also backed by an exhaustive 3.5-trillion-token dataset. This robust model represents a scaled-up version of TII’s previous Falcon 40B model, employing sophisticated technologies such as multi-query attention for enhanced scalability.

Trained on a cluster of nearly 4,000 A100 GPUs, Falcon 180B is finely tuned to work seamlessly with the Amazon SageMaker environment. The use of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for data storage and checkpoint management ensures both workload reliability and ease of operations.

Additionally, TII has rolled out an early chat – specialised version, Falcon 180B-Chat, which has been custom-tailored to excel in conversational applications. Both these models are deployed in a rigorously secure AWS environment that operates under Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) protocols, thereby offering enhanced data protection for users.

For those keen to explore Falcon 180B, the model is discoverable and ready for deployment within the SageMaker Studio via Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. In line with TII’s philosophy of responsible innovation, the model is released under the Falcon-180B TII License and Acceptable Use Policy for responsible AI use. Benchmark tests affirm the model's commanding performance, ranking it between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 across various language understanding and generation metrics.

Dr Ebtesam Almazrouei, Executive Director-Acting Chief AI Researcher of AI Cross Center Unit and Project Lead for LLM Projects at TII said: "By offering Falcon 180B as an open-access tool, we're laying the groundwork for organisations to harness its unparalleled functionalities and pave the way for future progress and transformative solutions in AI.

“Our pursuit of scientific knowledge should always be in service of the greater good, and open sourcing this technology allows us to democratize its benefits, foster collaboration, and ensure transparency. We are elated to provide Falcon180B platform that we believe will catalyse groundbreaking advancements in both academic research and industry solutions"

The responses from experts were positive. Huggingface scientist, Clémentine Fourrier, mentioned the model’s memory efficiency, highlighting that users could reduce memory needs by 75% without damaging the inference quality.

Wojciech Bajda, Managing Director – Public Sector Middle East and Africa at AWS, said: "Working in tandem with the Technology Innovation Institute to bring Falcon 180B to life using Amazon SageMaker has been a journey marked by numerous milestones – technological innovation, academic excellence, efficient training processes, and operational ease of use. Today's milestone of open Falcon 180B's integration into Amazon SageMaker JumpStart is not just a triumph for TII but also a proud moment for technological innovation in the Middle East.”

With Falcon LLM 180B, organisations worldwide can access its advanced tech capabilities and empower researchers to drive innovation in AI.