Falcon vs. FLAN-T5

Falcon

Falcon LLM is the flagship LLM of the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi.

Falcon LLM is a powerful LLM developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (https://www.tii.ae). Unlike other popular LLMs, Falcon was not built off of LLaMA, but instead using a custom data pipeline and distributed training system. The dataset is the RefinedWeb dataset (available on Hugging Face), and the initial models are available in 7B and 40B forms. Instruct and chat-finetuned models are available as well. Perhaps most excitingly, Falcon outperforms LLaMA, the previous de facto pretrained LLM.

Further reading

• huggingface.co/tiiuae
• twitter.com/Thom_Wolf/status/1662085371826405377
• www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230531005608/en/UAE%E2%80%99s-Falcon-40B-World%E2%80%99s-Top-Ranked-AI-Model-from-Technology-Innovation-Institute-is-Now-Royalty-Free

FLAN-T5

FLAN-T5 is a finetuned version of Google's popular T5 model with instruct-finetuning. As stated in the model repository's introduction, compared to T5, FLAN-T5 is "just better at everything." With its permissive license, FLAN-T5 has become a popular option for a starting instruct model.