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's broad family of open and hosted models for reasoning, coding, multimodal understanding, and agents. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current generation.

Qwen, formerly Tongyi Qianwen, is a family of language and multimodal models developed by Alibaba. It includes general-purpose, coding, vision-language, audio, embedding, and reasoning variants. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current hosted flagship, with support for multimodal and agentic workflows. Earlier Qwen generations, including Qwen 3.6 checkpoints, remain available as Apache 2.0 open weights; availability and licensing should therefore be checked per model.

Initial release: 2023-09-13

Current generation: Qwen 3.8

Reference

https://qwen.ai/

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16609
• https://huggingface.co/Qwen
• https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b