Falcon-180B vs PaLM (540B)

Falcon-180B (Technology Innovation Institute) and PaLM (540B) (Google Research) are both frontier AI models. Falcon-180B was published in September 2023 and PaLM (540B) in April 2022.

Falcon-180B was trained on 3.8×10²⁴ FLOP, about 1.5x the compute of PaLM (540B) at 2.5×10²⁴ FLOP. Training compute is the closest available proxy for how much was invested in a model, though it says nothing on its own about how well that compute was spent.

Falcon-180B leads on 6 of the 9 benchmarks they were both scored on, against 3 for PaLM (540B). Benchmark counts are a crude scoreboard — the evaluations differ wildly in what they measure and in how saturated they are — so the per-benchmark table below matters more than the tally.