--- description: Find out why Faisal Al Bannai made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. title: TIME100 AI 2024: Faisal Al Bannai image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta256595f98f8278d/698a5a8416d884ace9c3f0c0/TIME100-AI-2024-LEADERS_Faisal-Al-Bannai_RM-NEW.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Sep 05, 2024 # Faisal Al Bannai by [Harry Booth](/author/harry-booth/) ## Harry Booth Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Booth is a reporter at TIME.  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source: TIME) In 2023, the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), an arm of the Abu Dhabi government, spent millions of dollars building a series of large language models. ATRC secretary general Faisal Al Bannai then decided to release them online for free, reasoning that if they were as good as the team’s internal testing showed, it would bolster the UAE’s credibility and attract talent. It worked. The models, named Falcon after the UAE’s national bird, were by some metrics the best open source models at the time of their release, beating offerings by Meta and Google. “⁠I mean, two years ago, how many people would refer to UAE on the map of AI? Not many,” Al Bannai told TIME in February. Falcon changed that. Al Bannai says the focus is now on multimodality and getting better performance with less. To that end, the ATRC released two smaller models earlier this year: one with vision capabilities, and another based on a novel architecture. Al Bannai says he’s working on a larger, multimodal model that will compete with the likes of OpenAI’s GPT-4o. **Read More:**[_The UAE Is on a Mission to Become an AI Power_](https://time.com/6958369/artificial-intelligence-united-arab-emirates/ "undefined") It’s important that countries have a compelling open source alternative to the “proprietary AI from the large players,” he says. At home, a version of Falcon is being rolled out in the UAE’s healthcare system. Meanwhile, several states, including Serbia, Uzbekistan, and the Brazilian state of São Paulo, have bought into Al Bannai’s open source vision, inking deals with the UAE to use its models. Al Bannai got started in the technology industry importing smartphones to the Middle East in the early 2000s. At that time, he says, it was “too early for us as a country to capture” the internet boom. But having spent the past two decades digitizing its government, Al Bannai believes the UAE is well-positioned to leverage AI. Part of that advantage, says Al Bannai, is the country’s willingness to use private data, such as records held by hospitals and state-backed industries, to train future proprietary models for government or enterprise clients. “We can all scrape data from public sources. The real jewel is in the private data.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012755/faisal-al-bannai/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012755/faisal-al-bannai/"},"headline":"Faisal Al Bannai","datePublished":"2024-09-05T11:23:51.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:21.879Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012755/faisal-al-bannai/","keywords":["Tech"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta256595f98f8278d/698a5a8416d884ace9c3f0c0/TIME100-AI-2024-LEADERS_Faisal-Al-Bannai_RM-NEW.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Harry Booth","jobTitle":"Booth is a reporter at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/harry-booth/"}],"creator":"Harry Booth","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta256595f98f8278d/698a5a8416d884ace9c3f0c0/TIME100-AI-2024-LEADERS_Faisal-Al-Bannai_RM-NEW.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012755/faisal-al-bannai/","name":"Faisal Al Bannai"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"See Everyone on the 2024 TIME100 AI List","description":"The 2024 TIME100 AI list features innovators, thinkers, shapers and leaders who are making the future of AI.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/kDTs1aRd/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2024-09-05T10:50:00.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/kDTs1aRd.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012755/faisal-al-bannai/","duration":"PT1M53S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012755/faisal-al-bannai/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```