UAE releases new AI model to compete with big tech

A government research institute in the United Arab Emirates on Monday released a new open source GenAI model, which could rival the ones from big technology companies.

Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) said it was releasing the Falcon 2 series: Falcon 2 11B, a text-based model, and Falcon 2 11B VLM, a vision-to-language model that can generate a text description of an uploaded image.

TII is a research centre within Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council.