Falcon vs. Koala

Overview

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.

Initial release: 2023-05-23

Reference

https://falconllm.tii.ae/

Further Reading

• https://huggingface.co/tiiuae
• https://twitter.com/Thom_Wolf/status/1662085371826405377
• https://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

Overview

Released alongside Vicuna, Koala is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the web. On the developers' benchmarks, Koala outperforms its sibling Alpaca, though its adoption has been significantly less than that of its other sibling, Vicuna. Due to its use of LLaMA, only research use is permitted.

Initial release: 2023-04-03

Reference

https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2023/04/03/koala/

Further Reading