Today's Edition
SARA ALZAABI (ABU DHABI)
As next-generation technologies evolve at speed, the UAE is asserting itself as a global AI builder. That momentum is reflected in the Technology Innovation Institute's (TII) recent back-to-back release of two advanced language models: Falcon-H1R 7B and Falcon-H1 Arabic.
Falcon-H1R 7B and Falcon-H1 Arabic are large language models (LLM), the underlying AI systems that power tools such as chatbots, text generators, and other language-based applications. TII, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi's Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), designed each one for a distinct purpose.
Try the Falcon-H1R 7B chat through TII's official website and find that it is highly similar to the conversations one could have with the more popular GPT-4 systems.
The difference lies in what Falcon seeks to prove and achieve: With its compact 7B model, it is making high-level reasoning more accessible while significantly reducing the computational cost traditionally associated with such systems.
In simple terms, the model reflects a broader shift in how AI is being built and used. For instance, when asking many everyday questions, a smaller and more efficient system like Falcon-H1R 7B can deliver accurate answers without the heavy computing power required by much larger models.
Speaking to Aletihad, Dr Hakim Hacid, Chief Researcher of the Artificial Intelligence and Digital Science Research Centre at TII, said Falcon-H1R 7B marks a shift in how high-performance AI is designed.
"Falcon H1R 7B is a proof point that compact models can deliver frontier-level reasoning performance when they're built for efficiency and reasoning from the start. Despite being a 7B model, it matches or outperforms reasoning models that are 2–7× larger, showing that the future of high-performing AI won't be defined by size alone."
The model focuses on reasoning and excels in STEM, logic, and analytical tasks for research, technical, and enterprise use.
Dr Hacid explained that a key advantage lies in test-time reasoning, which allows smaller models to compete with much larger systems.
"Falcon H1R 7B adds a confidence-aware method (Deep Think with confidence, or DeepConf) that prunes low-quality reasoning traces using the model's own confidence scores, so accuracy improves while generating fewer tokens, which is a key advantage for smaller models competing with larger systems."
He added that the efficiency, rather than scale, was a deliberate priority to make advanced reasoning more accessible and practical.
Falcon H1R 7B has been optimised for speed, low memory use, and minimal energy consumption for real-world deployment.
He said releasing the model as open source - with public access via Hugging Face - reflects TII's commitment to accessibility and collaboration.
It provides developers and researchers with broad access to advanced reasoning capabilities beyond large proprietary systems.
World's Leading Arabic AI Model
Alongside Falcon H1R 7B, TII also released a newly developed large language model specifically built for Arabic, differentiating it from a general language model that knows and can translate some Arabic.
Falcon-H1 Arabic has been regarded as the highest-performing system on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard (OALL).
Trained using Arabic-focused datasets from the start, this model has been designed to work well with Arabic language tasks - reading, writing, understanding meaning, handling dialects, reasoning, and more.
"Falcon-H1 Arabic is a direct response to regional linguistic and cultural needs and to community feedback on areas where earlier Arabic models struggled," Dr Hacid told Aletihad.
"Users across the Arab world pushed for improvements in long-context understanding, dialect variation handling, mathematical reasoning, and domain knowledge. Falcon-H1 Arabic is enabling innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful for the region's linguistic and cultural context."
It was trained on real-world Arabic use, going beyond Modern Standard Arabic to include major regional dialects.
Beyond OALL, the Falcon-H1 Arabic models achieve outstanding results on more targeted benchmarks, including: 3LM, for STEM reasoning; ArabCulture, for cultural and contextual understanding; and AraDice for dialect comprehension.
This makes Falcon-H1 Arabic a reliable assistant that uses and understands everyday language.
The release of this Falcon model "signals that Arabic AI is entering a new phase where state-of-the-art performance is possible without relying solely on very large parameter counts," Dr Hacid said.
"Falcon-H1 Arabic's 34B model scores 75.36% on OALL and outperforms 70B+ models, including Qwen2.5 72B and Llama-3.3 70B. Surpassing 70B-scale transformers underscores the combined impact of the Falcon-H1 hybrid architecture, data quality, and post-training pipeline."
Beyond everyday uses, Falcon-H1 Arabic enables large-scale, long-form analysis in Arabic, allowing sectors such as government, healthcare, and research to process extensive documents in a single interaction without losing context, Dr Hacid said.
Highlighting the significance of this innovation, he added: "Falcon-H1 Arabic supports the region's linguistic and cultural needs, and its benchmark leadership explicitly demonstrates TII's ability to build sovereign AI capabilities that compete at the highest global levels, while advancing UAE leadership in Arabic AI research and innovation."
