Tag Archives: TII

I know, I added a question mark, because the Reuters article leaves me (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/uae-releases-new-ai-model-compete-with-big-tech-2024-05-13/) with questions. It is nice to see that the UAE is going all in for the AI generation and the Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) is releasing a Falcon 2 series: Falcon 2 11B, a text-based model, and Falcon 2 11B VLM based system. However the US gives them scrutiny with the statement “American or Chinese technology.” As such the US is drawing battle lines in the middle east. Considering that we see “Emirati AI firm G42 pulled out Chinese hardware and divested stakes in Chinese companies before securing a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft that was coordinated with Washington”. The danger for the US is that so far Microsoft hasn’t been delivering anything other that mediocrity. As such should this fall over the US will lose a hell of a lot more. Considering that the UAE is now BRICS, there is a chance that Microsoft (and a decent one) that Microsoft will go into its Delay, Blame and Miscommunication protocols. On the other hand I know NOTHING about either the Chinese or the American chip in question. The better setting is that UAE’s Falcon and Meta’s Llama, have made their code publicly available for anyone to use. As such that would imply the better creation of traction with the population. We are also given “Al Bannai said he was optimistic about Falcon 2’s performance and that they were working on “Falcon 3 generation”” In the end this was the first I heard about the Falcon, so we will be getting a lot more soon enough and I should look into the TII and what else they have cooking. You see “a vision-to-language model that can generate a text description of an uploaded image” has added bonus regarding yesterday’s blog. A simple scan of the boarding pass, or luggage tag could imply that booking a new tourist could be done in seconds. I have never been able to check into a hotel in under 5-10 minutes. Take that amount and multiply it by 53 million. That is an annual saving of 505 years. And that is only one country. That and a few other blogs I have written about shows you the essential need to upgrade tourist systems. The question. Then becomes whether such a system will have an Arabic setting and the UAE will have a system that benefits the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Indonesia. All places with growing tourism at present. That is a setting not to be ignored. And the west? Well that remains the question, they will see the benefit of upgrading son enough and when Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt and others see that time benefit, they will all come on board regardless of where that chip originated. 

Time will tell who wins that caper in the end, because the $1.5 billion investment doesn’t last long when you are confronted with Delay, Blame and Miscommunication tactics (if that happens).