Falcon vs. FLAN-UL2

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-UL2

Similar to FLAN-T5, FLAN-UL2 is a model based on Google's popular T5 architecture with an upgraded pre-training procedure dubbed UL2. On most NLU benchmarks, FLAN-UL2 outperforms FLAN-T5 by a significant margin.

Further reading

• www.yitay.net/blog/flan-ul2-20b