Falcon is a series of open-source large language models developed by TII (Technology Innovation Institute), with sizes ranging from small (1B) to massive (180B+ parameters). Starting with Falcon 40B and expanding to Falcon 2, Falcon 3, Falcon-H1, Falcon Arabic, Falcon 180B, and the innovative Falcon Mamba variants, these models handle text, images, video, and audio—all under the TII Falcon License 2.0.As an open-source counterpart to commercial LLMs like GPT‑4, Claude, and Gemma, Falcon is fully accessible with published weights, reproducible builds, and permissive licensing (Apache-based), enabling widespread adoption and on‑prem deployment .
Key features include:
- Scalable model sizes: Covers 1B, 3B, 7B, 11B, 40B, 180B+ parameter models
- Multimodal support: Capable of processing text, images, video, and audio (e.g., Falcon 3 Vision/Video/Audio)
- Long context windows: Up to 128K tokens for XXL models
- Efficient architectures: FLASH attention, Mamba variants delivering speed & reduced memory usage
- Fully open-source: All weights, checkpoints, and training pipelines released under transparent license with no closed components
Use cases include:
- Conversational AI and chatbot development
- Document summarization and analysis
- Multilingual and multimodal applications
- Real-time audio/video captioning or description
- Lightweight inference on laptops or edge devices (via quantized models)
