Falcon vs. Qwen

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

Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language models, including chat models, code models, and multimodal variants. Qwen 3 and QwQ are the latest releases, with strong reasoning capabilities.

Qwen (formerly Tongyi Qianwen) is a comprehensive family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. The series includes base models, chat models, code-specific variants (CodeQwen), and multimodal models (Qwen-VL). Qwen models excel at multilingual tasks and have become particularly popular in Asia. The latest releases include Qwen 3 and QwQ (focused on reasoning), competing effectively with Western counterparts while offering strong Chinese language support.

Initial release: 2023-09-13

Reference

https://qwenlm.github.io/

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16609
• https://huggingface.co/Qwen