Falcon 180B
TII's open-weight model that led open leaderboards on release
Falcon 180B is a 180 billion parameter language model released by the UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute in September 2023, trained on 3.5 trillion tokens. At release it was the largest openly available language model and topped the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard, outperforming Llama 2 70B and matching or beating GPT-3.5 on several benchmarks, including an MMLU score around 70. TII distributed it under a royalty-free license based on Apache 2.0, with an added clause requiring separate permission for hosted deployments that offer the model to third parties. Its 2,048-token context window looks small by later standards, and Falcon 180B has largely been superseded by TII’s smaller, more efficient Falcon 2 and Falcon 3 generations, but it remains a reference point for how far open-weight models had come by late 2023.