Abu Dhabi: 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.

According to BERNAMA News Agency, Falcon Arabic is built on top of Falcon 3-7B (7-billion-parameter) and is one of the most advanced Arabic AI models developed to date. It has been trained on a high-quality native (non-translated) Arabic dataset that spans both Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects, capturing the full linguistic diversity of the Arab world. The Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard benchmarks indicate that 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 and matches the performance of models up to 10 times its size, demonstrating that smart architecture can surpass sheer scale.