# Falcon 180B: Model Overview

> Falcon 180B is an Open Access high-performance Large Language Model (LLM) with comparable performance to LLMs like Google's PaLM 2 (that powers Bard) and close to GPT-4 level performance.

James Briggs · 2023-09-07

Falcon 180B is a 180-billion-parameter **L**arge **L**anguage **M**odel (LLM). It has comparable performance to Google's PaLM 2 (Bard) and is not far behind GPT-4.

It is touted as the "Llama 2" killer due to its higher performance as a pretrained-only model. As of September 2023, Falcon 180B ranked as the highest-performing pretrained LLM on the Hugging Face [Open LLM Leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/open_llm_leaderboard).

The model is _big_. Inference requires 640GB of memory — a mere _eight_ A100 80GB GPUs — when quantized to half-precision (FP16). Alternatively, we can quantize down to int4, requiring eight A100 _40GB_ GPUs (320GB memory). That can easily put you back $20K / month if you keep it online.

For some, this price tag may be worth it. Falcon 180B's license permits commercial usage and allows organizations to keep their data on their chosen infrastructure, control training, and maintain more ownership over their model than alternatives like OpenAI's GPT-4 can provide.

Performance-wise, Falcon 180B is impressive. It is the highest-performing open-access LLM and is comparable the PaLM-2 Large (which powers Bard).

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/vr8gru94/production/add776e00a50b6a8dd39c22276f57fe0ec69482d-1638x1299.png)


Compared to OpenAI's models, Falcon 180B  outperforms GPT-3.5 on some benchmarks. For the majority of benchmarks, Falcon 180B scores between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 [1].

[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3oNsGtRjqo&feature=youtu.be)


We will be adding further information and guides surrounding **Falcon 180B** to this page — so stay tuned!

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## References

[1] P. Schmid, O. Sanseviero, P. Cuenca, L. von Werra, J. Launay, [Spread Your Wings: Falcon 180B is here](https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon-180b) (2023), Hugging Face Blog