AI Falcon — the Arabic challenger to GPT

Introduction

While the world talks about ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, a new contender rises from the Middle East. Meet Falcon AI, developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi. It’s the first large-scale Arabic open-source LLM, positioned to rival Western AI giants.

But what exactly is Falcon in 2025? What models does it include? And why should entrepreneurs, developers, and startups keep an eye on it?

 

Table of Contents

1. What Is AI Falcon?
2. Falcon Models: From 7B to 180B
3. How to Use Falcon in Practice
4. Falcon: Pros and Cons
5. Falcon vs the Competition
6. Who Should Use Falcon?
7. Falcon's Future: What's Next?
8. Conclusion

 

What Is AI Falcon?

Falcon is a family of large language models (LLMs) created by TII in Abu Dhabi. Based on transformer architecture like ChatGPT, Falcon is capable of:

• generating text,
• translating,
• analyzing data,
• coding,
• building bots and virtual assistants.

💡 Fun fact: Falcon is one of the few high-performance LLMs that is fully open-source and free to use commercially, making it ideal for startups and R&D teams.

 

Falcon Models: From 7B to 180B

Model Name	Parameters	Training Data Size	Highlights
Falcon 7B	7 billion	1.5 trillion tokens	Lightweight, fast model
Falcon 40B	40 billion	1.5 trillion tokens	Great balance of power and speed
Falcon 180B	180 billion	3.5 trillion tokens	Flagship 2025 model

🧠 Falcon 180B is a competitor to GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus. According to LMSYS benchmarks, it ranks among the top 5 LLMs globally.

 

How to Use Falcon in Practice

You can access Falcon via:

• 🖥️ Hugging Face — in-browser or API access
• 📦 Amazon SageMaker — for developers and production use
• 🧪 Local deployment — if you have a 24+ GB GPU

💬 Prompt examples:

• “Explain quantum computing in simple terms”
• “Write a Python script to parse an RSS feed”
• “Compare Dubai and London’s real estate markets in 2025”

 

Falcon: Pros and Cons

Pros 🟢	Cons 🔴
Fully open-source	Requires powerful hardware
Arabic + English language support	Smaller training data than GPT-4
Free for commercial use	Fewer plugins and UIs than ChatGPT

 

Falcon vs the Competition

Model	Parameters	Open Source	Languages	LMSYS Score
Falcon 180B	180B	✅	🇬🇧 🇸🇦	★★★★☆
GPT-4o (OpenAI)	1+ trillion	❌	Multilingual	★★★★★
Claude 3 Opus	~200B	❌	Multilingual	★★★★★
Mistral (Mixtral)	12x7B	✅	🇬🇧 🇪🇸 🇫🇷	★★★★☆

 

Who Should Use Falcon?

Falcon is perfect for:

• 👨‍💻 Developers looking for customizable AI
• 🚀 Startups who want to avoid expensive APIs
• 🏢 Arabic businesses in need of native language support
• 🧑‍🎓 Researchers and universities for AI experiments

 

Falcon's Future: What's Next?

In 2025 and beyond, Falcon is:

• powering UAE government AI projects
• expanding to support more languages (Turkish, Farsi, etc.)
• preparing a multimodal version with image/video understanding

🌍 The UAE is positioning Falcon as a national AI brand, with ambitions to rival Western giants.

 

Conclusion

Falcon isn’t just another LLM — it’s a strategic, open-source powerhouse that combines flexibility with real-world use. Whether you're building apps, analyzing data, or training custom AI, Falcon offers a compelling, cost-free option.

👉 Try Falcon via Hugging Face or explore more tools on AIMarketWave!

 

🔗 Related articles on AIMarketWave:

• Top 10 AI Tools for Programming in 2025: What Developers Are Choosing
• Which AI Chatbot Should You Choose in 2025? GPT 5, Claude 4, DeepSeek R1, YandexGPT 5 and More