Falcon vs. Phi

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

Phi is a series of compact language models developed by Microsoft using textbooks and synthetic data.

Phi-1 and Phi-2 are 1.3B and 2.7B parameter language models, respectively, developed by Microsoft to demonstrate the ability of smaller language models trained on high-quality data. Despite its size and not having an instruct finetuned counterpart, the Phi-2 model is well-suited to research and experimentation given its size and MIT license.

Initial release: 2023-06-20

Reference

https://ai.azure.com/explore/models/microsoft-phi-2/version/4/registry/azureml-msr

Further Reading

• https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-2
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644