Source : WAM
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has unveiled Falcon H1R 7B, a next-generation AI model designed to make advanced AI more accessible, offering world-class reasoning performance in a compact, efficient, and openly available format.
With just 7 billion parameters, Falcon H1R 7B challenges—and in many cases surpasses—larger open-source AI models globally, including Microsoft’s Phi 4 Reasoning Plus 14B, Alibaba’s Qwen3 32B, and NVIDIA’s Nemotron H 47B.
This release reinforces TII’s leadership in efficient AI innovation and highlights the UAE’s expanding influence in global technology.
Faisal al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council, said, “Falcon H1R reflects the UAE’s commitment to building open and responsible AI that delivers real national and global value. By bringing world-class reasoning into a compact, efficient model, we are expanding access to advanced AI in a way that supports economic growth, research leadership, and long-term technological resilience.”
Falcon H1R 7B builds on the Falcon H1-7B foundation, employing a specialized training approach and a hybrid Transformer–Mamba architecture that enhances both accuracy and speed.
“Falcon H1R 7B marks a leap forward in the reasoning capabilities of compact AI systems,” said Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII. “It achieves near-perfect scores on elite benchmarks while keeping memory and energy use exceptionally low, critical criteria for real-world deployment and sustainability.”
This design enables what researchers call “latent intelligence,” allowing Falcon H1R 7B to reason more effectively and efficiently. The model establishes a new Pareto frontier, achieving optimal speed without sacrificing quality.
On competitive benchmarks, Falcon H1R 7B delivered outstanding results. In mathematics, it scored 88.1 percent on AIME-24, outperforming ServiceNow AI’s Apriel 1.5 (15B) at 86.2 percent, demonstrating that a 7B model can rival much larger systems.
In coding and agentic tasks, it achieved 68.6 percent accuracy, the highest among models under 8B, while also outperforming larger models like Qwen3-32B on LCB v6, SciCode Sub, and TB Hard benchmarks. For example, Falcon H1R scored 34 percent compared with China’s DeepSeek R1-0528 Qwen3-8B at 26.9 percent and Qwen3-32B at 33.4 percent.
In general reasoning, Falcon H1R exhibited strong logic and instruction-following capabilities, matching or approaching the performance of larger models such as Microsoft’s Phi 4 Reasoning Plus 14B, while using only half the parameters.
Regarding efficiency, the model achieved up to 1,500 tokens/sec/GPU at batch 64, nearly twice the speed of Qwen3-8B, thanks to its hybrid Transformer–Mamba architecture, delivering faster, scalable performance without compromising accuracy.
“This model is the result of world-class research and engineering. It shows how scientific precision and scalable design can go hand in hand,” said Dr. Hakim Hacid, Chief Researcher at TII’s Artificial Intelligence and Digital Research Centre. “We are proud to deliver a model that enables the community to build smarter, faster, and more accessible AI systems.”
In line with TII’s commitment to AI transparency and collaboration, Falcon H1R 7B is being released as an open-source model under the Falcon TII License. Developers, researchers, and institutions worldwide can access it via Hugging Face, alongside a detailed technical report outlining the training methods and benchmark performance.
This release continues the global success of TII’s Falcon programme. Since their introduction, Falcon models have consistently ranked among the world’s top AI systems, with the first four generations achieving number-one global rankings in their respective categories.
Across iterations, Falcon has set new standards in performance, efficiency, and deployability, proving that compact, sovereign AI models can outperform much larger counterparts.
These achievements underline Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s growing leadership in frontier AI and demonstrate TII’s capacity to deliver research that competes at the highest global level.
