point to the spirit of open source. "If the source isn’t fully available, it’s not open source," argues the Open Source Initiative’s latest draft statement. "The ‘exclusive source code’ is just proprietary software with a free tier." The Future: Falcon 180 Source Code? The Falcon 40 source code exclusive is a prelude to an even bigger release. Our industry sources suggest TII has already trained Falcon 180B—a model rumored to rival GPT-4. The source code for that model, ironically, is said to be more open, as TII attempts to challenge Meta’s Llama 3 dominance.
The exclusive optimizations yield nearly double the throughput. For a company running a Falcon-powered chatbot with 1 million daily queries, this cuts inference costs by over 50%. Since the keyword began trending on Dev.to and Hacker News, the open-source community has been divided.
In the frantic race to dominate the Large Language Model (LLM) landscape, a quiet revolution has been brewing. For the past two years, the "Falcon" series from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi has been the dark horse of generative AI—offering performance that rivals Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemma, but with a distinctly enterprise-friendly twist.
// -- Enterprise Only -- // IF TII_SUPPORT == 1 // Include proprietary tensor parallelization // ELSE // Use standard PyTorch parallel This suggests that the publicly available source code on GitHub may be a "community edition." The true to enterprise clients includes optimized tensor parallelization that delivers 2.4x faster inference on multi-GPU setups.
TII is reportedly preparing a "Source Available Plus" license for Falcon 180 that releases the custom Flash kernels to the public, keeping only the orchestration layer proprietary. If you are a solo developer or a hacker, the public Falcon 40 weights and the open-source community implementation are sufficient. You will run the model, you will fine-tune it, and it will work well.
Today, we are diving deep into what developers have been clamoring for: the .
argue that TII’s move to keep the top-tier kernels exclusive is fair. "Training Falcon 40 cost an estimated $5 million in compute," wrote Reddit user u/LLM_Plumber. "They gave us the weights. Let them make money on the code optimizations."
Specifically, the file tii_legal.h contains the following commented block: