Falcon-180B (Technology Innovation Institute) and Grok-2 (xAI) are both frontier AI models. Falcon-180B was published in September 2023 and Grok-2 in August 2024.
Grok-2 was trained on 3 x 10^25 FLOP, about 7.9x the compute of Falcon-180B at 3.8 x 10^24 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.
Grok-2 wins the single benchmark both were scored on. 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.
| Field | Falcon-180B | Grok-2 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Technology Innovation Institute | xAI |
| Published | Sep 6, 2023 | Aug 13, 2024 |
| Training compute | 3.8 x 10^24 FLOP | 3 x 10^25 FLOP |
| Parameters | 180B | — |
| Dataset size | 3.5T | — |
| Training hardware | NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40 GB | NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB |
| Chips used | 4,096 | — |
| Training time | 4.3K h | — |
| Training cost (2023 USD) | $11M | $32M |
| Training power draw | 3.3 MW | — |
| Accessibility | Open weights (restricted use) | API access |
| Open weights | Yes | No |
| Country | United Arab Emirates | United States |
| Benchmark | Falcon-180B | Grok-2 |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities Index(ECI Score) | 111.9 | 130.8 |
