Falcon 2
TII's Falcon generation between Falcon 180B and Falcon 3, adding a vision-language variant
Falcon 2 is an 11 billion parameter model family the Technology Innovation Institute released in May 2024, trained on 5.5 trillion tokens across 11 languages. It sits between the earlier Falcon 180B and the later Falcon 3 generation, and it’s the point where TII added a vision-language variant, Falcon 2 11B VLM, that can take an image as input and describe or reason about it in text alongside the base text-only model. Training used a staged approach that grew the context window from 2,048 tokens up to 8,192. TII released it under its own TII Falcon License, an Apache 2.0-based permissive license with an added acceptable-use policy, and claimed it outperformed Meta’s Llama 3 8B on several benchmarks at a similar parameter count.