FALCON LLM

FALCON LLM

Falcon LLM, is a model that has swiftly ascended to the top of the LLM hierarchy. Falcon LLM, specifically Falcon-40B, is a foundational LLM equipped with 40 billion parameters and has been trained on an impressive one trillion tokens. It operates as an autoregressive decoder-only model, which essentially means it predicts the subsequent token in a sequence based on the preceding tokens. This architecture is reminiscent of the GPT model. Notably, Falcon's architecture has demonstrated superior performance to GPT-3, achieving this feat with only 75% of the training compute budget and requiring significantly less compute during inference.

The team at the Technology Innovation Institute placed a strong emphasis on data quality during the development of Falcon. Recognizing the sensitivity of LLMs to training data quality, they constructed a data pipeline that scaled to tens of thousands of CPU cores. This allowed for rapid processing and the extraction of high-quality content from the web, achieved through extensive filtering and deduplication processes.

In addition to Falcon-40B, TII has also introduced other versions, including Falcon-7B, which possesses 7 billion parameters and has been trained on 1,500 billion tokens. There are also specialized models like Falcon-40B-Instruct and Falcon-7B-Instruct, tailored for specific tasks.

Training Falcon-40B was an extensive process. The model was trained on the RefinedWeb dataset, a massive English web dataset constructed by TII. This dataset was built on top of CommonCrawl and underwent rigorous filtering to ensure quality. Once the model was prepared, it was validated against several open-source benchmarks, including EAI Harness, HELM, and BigBench.

Key Features Overview of Falcon LLM:

• Extensive Parameters: Falcon-40B is equipped with 40 billion parameters, ensuring comprehensive learning and performance.

• Autoregressive Decoder-Only Model: This architecture allows Falcon to predict subsequent tokens based on preceding ones, similar to the GPT model.

• Superior Performance: Falcon outperforms GPT-3 while utilizing only 75% of the training compute budget.

• High-Quality Data Pipeline: TII's data pipeline ensures the extraction of high-quality content from the web, crucial for the model's training.

• Variety of Models: In addition to Falcon-40B, TII offers Falcon-7B and specialized models like Falcon-40B-Instruct and Falcon-7B-Instruct.

• Open-Source Availability: Falcon LLM has been open-sourced, promoting accessibility and inclusivity in the AI domain.