Falcon-H1 Arabic, the new Artificial Intelligence system created in Abu Dhabi that understands Arabic, has outperformed Meta’s Llama-70B and China’s Qwen-72B, despite being less than half their size, according to reports.
The AI platform that understands Arabic has also come first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard, which measures how well AI systems handle the Arabic language. The tool, created by Technology Innovation Institute, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, delivers state-of-the-art accuracy, context handling, and linguistic representation, according to reports.
Built on years of foundational work in Arabic AI, the Falcon-H1 Arabic is available in 3B, 7B, and 34B parameter sizes and can meet diverse infrastructure and use-case needs. Falcon-H1 Arabic introduces improvements in data quality, dialect coverage, long-context stability, and mathematical reasoning, enabling more accurate, reliable, and contextually aware Arabic understanding across real-world applications, according to the makers.
Building on the strong reception of the Falcon-Arabic models released earlier this year, which highlighted the community’s clear need for high-quality Arabic LLMs, TII has advanced its work with the new Falcon-H1 Arabic family.
The AI model is built on a hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture and represents a complete departure from previous transformer-based versions. Available in 3B, 7B, and 34B parameter sizes, the models are designed to meet diverse infrastructure and use-case needs.
The smallest model (3B) outperforms Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by 10 percentage points on Arabic benchmarks. The 7B version leads its category. The largest 34B model surpasses systems more than twice its size, achieving 75.36 percent accuracy on comprehensive Arabic understanding tests.
“Falcon-H1 Arabic responds directly to the needs of our communities, including developers and businesses. By advancing architecture, data quality, and long-context reasoning, we are creating enablers that unlock new possibilities in education, healthcare, governance, and enterprise, and more, all in Arabic. This model represents an important step in our mission to deliver world-class AI that serves the region and contributes to global progress,” according to TII CEO Dr. Najwa Aaraj.
The Falcon-H1 Arabic also handles tasks that matter in daily life, which includes understanding dialect phrases, reasoning in Arabic, maintaining long conversations, and interpreting context rather than translating word-by-word. It has the ability to analyse legal contracts, research papers, and medical records as it can process up to 192,000 words in a single conversation.