Falcon 180B: The New Open-Source LLM Champion

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has recently unveiled a groundbreaking open-source Large Language Model (LLM) that is causing quite a stir in the AI community. Named Falcon 180B, this revolutionary model is being hailed as the new champion of open-source LLMs, boasting comparable performance to Google’s PaLM 2 (Bard) and not far behind GPT-4.

Falcon 180B has already claimed the top spot as the highest-performing pretrained LLM on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard as of September 2023. But this model is not just about size. It requires a hefty 640GB of memory when quantized to half-precision (FP16), which can easily cost around $20K per month if kept online. Despite the steep price tag, many organizations find it worth the investment due to its commercial usage license and the control it offers over data, training, and model ownership.

Performance-wise, Falcon 180B is a force to be reckoned with. It is the highest-performing open-access LLM and is comparable to the PaLM-2 Large, which powers Bard. In comparison to OpenAI’s models, Falcon 180B outperforms GPT-3.5 on some benchmarks. For the majority of benchmarks, Falcon 180B scores between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

The Falcon 180B was trained on a colossal 3.5 trillion tokens using TII’s RefinedWeb dataset, making it the longest single-epoch pretraining for an open model. It achieves state-of-the-art results across natural language tasks, topping the leaderboard for (pre-trained) open-access models and rivaling proprietary models like PaLM-2.

The Falcon 180B model is available in the Hugging Face ecosystem, starting with Transformers version 4.33. The model can be used for training and inference scripts and examples, integrations with tools such as bitsandbytes (4-bit quantization), PEFT (parameter efficient fine-tuning) and GPTQ assisted generation (also known as “speculative decoding”), and RoPE scaling support for larger context lengths.

In conclusion, Falcon 180B is a game-changer in the world of open-source LLMs. Its impressive performance and scalability make it a valuable asset for organizations looking to leverage AI for their operations. As the AI community continues to fine-tune and enhance this model, we can expect even more impressive results in the future.

Falcon 180B is not just a powerful tool, but it also offers flexibility and control that is unmatched in the industry. Its license permits commercial usage and allows organizations to keep their data on their chosen infrastructure. This means that organizations can control training and maintain more ownership over their model than alternatives like OpenAI’s GPT-4 can provide.

In the future, we can expect more updates and enhancements to Falcon 180B. The creators and the AI community are continuously working on improving the model and expanding its capabilities. This means that Falcon 180B is not just a powerful tool today, but it promises to be an even more potent asset in the future.