A groundbreaking achievement in the realm of artificial intelligence has recently come to light with the release of the Falcon 180 Billion (Falcon 180B) language model. Developed by TII and made available on HuggingFace, this model has set a new benchmark for open models, boasting an impressive 180 billion parameters.

With its vast scale and complexity, Falcon 180B surpasses all previous and competing language models in the open domain. According to experts, it outperforms previously released models such as Llama 2 70B and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 on MMLU. It is also on par with Google’s PaLM 2-Large on various benchmark evaluations. The community’s further fine-tuning of Falcon 180B is eagerly anticipated now that it is openly accessible.

The training process for Falcon 180B was a monumental task, involving a staggering 3.5 trillion tokens. TII utilized its RefinedWeb dataset for this purpose, resulting in the longest single-epoch pretraining for an open model. The training was conducted simultaneously on up to 4096 GPUs using Amazon SageMaker, totaling approximately 7,000,000 GPU hours. This underscores the significant computational power and resources required to develop such a sophisticated model.

The Falcon 180B predominantly relies on web data from the RefinedWeb dataset, which constitutes about 85% of the total data. The remaining 15% is a mix of curated content, including conversations, technical papers, and a small fraction of code. This diverse dataset equips Falcon 180B with a wide-ranging knowledge base, enabling it to tackle a variety of natural language tasks.

Falcon 180B builds on the groundbreaking innovations of its predecessor, Falcon 40B. It incorporates features like multiquery attention, which greatly enhances its scalability. The released chat model has undergone extensive fine-tuning on chat and instruction datasets, incorporating large-scale conversational data. This has further improved the model’s performance in conversational tasks.

In terms of performance, Falcon 180B is truly exceptional. It achieves state-of-the-art results across natural language tasks, surpassing other open-access models and even rivalling proprietary models like PaLM-2. Its superiority is evident as it outperforms Llama 2 70B and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 on MMLU, while also matching Google’s PaLM 2-Large on various benchmarks. These accomplishments highlight the model’s extraordinary capabilities and its potential to revolutionize natural language processing.

Falcon 180B is available on the Hugging Face Hub and is accessible through the Falcon Chat Demo Space. While it can be used for commercial purposes, certain stringent conditions apply, specifically excluding any form of hosting use. These restrictions ensure that the model is utilized in an ethical manner and prevent misuse.

This release of Falcon 180B represents a significant leap forward in the field of language models. Its massive scale, extensive training, and state-of-the-art performance set a new standard for open models. As the largest openly available language model to date, Falcon 180B has the potential to make a profound impact on fields ranging from natural language processing to artificial intelligence research. However, its application is subject to strict conditions to ensure ethical and responsible usage. Despite these restrictions, the release of Falcon 180B marks a significant milestone, paving the way for future advances in language models.

Sources:
– Falcon 180B language model release on HuggingFace
– RefinedWeb dataset development by TII