Falcon 40B

Falcon 40B is a 40-billion-parameter large language model released by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in the UAE in May 2023, trained on AWS SageMaker. At launch it ranked as the top open-source model on public leaderboards, a notable milestone for a model trained outside the US and China.

The model is multilingual, including Arabic support, and was released under the Apache 2.0 license, making it genuinely free for commercial use — a contrast to many contemporaries with custom community licenses. Falcon 40B remains a reference point in open-model history, though it has since been eclipsed on benchmarks by later open models and its training data and techniques are less documented than newer open releases.