ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, May 22 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) — The UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), today unveiled two major AI advancements: Falcon Arabic, the first-ever Arabic language model in the Falcon series – now the best-performing Arabic AI model in the region – and Falcon-H1, a new model that redefines performance and portability through a new architectural design. In the small-to-medium size category of AI models (30 to 70 billion parameters), Falcon-H1 outperforms comparable offerings from Meta’s LlaMA and Alibaba’s Qwen, enabling real-world AI on everyday devices and in resource-limited settings. The announcement was made during a keynote address by H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Advisor to the UAE President and Secretary General of ATRC, at the Make it in the Emirates event.
Built on top of Falcon 3-7B (7-billion-parameter), Falcon Arabic is one of the most advanced Arabic AI models developed to date. Trained on a high-quality native (non-translated) Arabic dataset spanning Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects, it captures the full linguistic diversity of the Arab world. According to the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard benchmarks, Falcon Arabic outperforms all other regionally available Arabic language models, reinforcing its leadership in sovereign, multilingual AI. It ranks as the best-performing Arabic model in its class, matching the performance of models up to 10 times its size, proving that smart architecture can outperform sheer scale.