Abu Dhabi has developed an artificial intelligence system that outperforms all other models in Arabic language understanding on global benchmarks, while operating with fewer parameters and faster processing speeds than systems built by major international technology companies.
Falcon-H1 Arabic, created by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard, which evaluates how effectively large language models process Arabic. Its largest version, with 34 billion parameters, scores higher than Meta’s Llama-70B and China’s Qwen-72B, despite being less than half their size.
The development addresses a long-standing challenge for Arabic users of artificial intelligence. Many existing tools generate text that appears correct but fails to capture meaning, struggles with dialects or overlooks cultural context. Falcon-H1 Arabic is designed to directly address these shortcomings.
Arabic presents unique difficulties for AI systems. Word meaning can shift based on context, sentence structure is flexible, and daily communication often involves moving between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic. Most global AI models are trained primarily on English, limiting their effectiveness when applied to Arabic.
Research published in Communications of the ACM highlights that Arabic suffers from a lack of large, high-quality annotated datasets, particularly for dialects and informal usage. This gap has resulted in weaker AI performance in Arabic across sectors such as education, customer service, government platforms and healthcare.
Falcon-H1 Arabic is trained on Arabic-first datasets that include formal language, regional dialects and culturally relevant material. The model is available in three sizes, 3 billion, 7 billion and 34 billion parameters, allowing organisations to deploy it according to their technical capacity.
Performance results show the 3B model exceeds Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by 10 percentage points on Arabic benchmarks. The 7B model leads among systems in its class. The 34B flagship achieves 75.36 percent accuracy on comprehensive Arabic language understanding tests, outperforming models more than twice its size.
In practical use, the system handles tasks such as understanding dialect expressions, reasoning directly in Arabic, sustaining extended conversations and interpreting meaning without relying on literal translation. It supports contexts of up to 192,000 words, enabling analysis of lengthy legal documents, academic papers or full medical records without losing coherence.
Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across more than 20 countries, yet it has historically played a secondary role in global AI development. Many large platforms treat Arabic as an added feature rather than a core language. Falcon-H1 Arabic was built with Arabic as the primary focus from the outset.
The system’s potential applications span multiple sectors across the UAE and the wider region. Educational institutions can deploy AI tutors that reflect how students actually speak and write. Healthcare providers can use tools that account for cultural norms. Businesses can automate customer service while preserving nuance. Government platforms can operate in natural Arabic rather than translated English structures.
TII’s Falcon models have ranked first in their categories since 2023. The release of Falcon-H1 Arabic continues that record while addressing a key gap in AI development, a foundation model created specifically for Arabic speakers rather than adapted from English-based systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic is available for public use at chat.falconllm.tii.ae, enabling developers, startups, researchers, media organisations and public institutions to build Arabic-language AI tools with fluency comparable to leading English-based platforms.