Falcon 2 vs Falcon 1

Falcon 2 vs Falcon 1: What Changed Between Generations

Falcon 1 spanned 7B, 40B and 180B models with a licence that many teams found too restrictive. Falcon 2 is a reset: fewer sizes, a permissive base, and a published technical report.

Back to the overview

The licence change is the headline

Falcon 1 shipped under the TII Falcon License 1.0, which required a separate commercial agreement above a revenue threshold. Falcon 2 11B moved to the TII Falcon License 2.0, which is Apache 2.0-based and adds an acceptable use policy instead of a revenue gate.

Model changes

  • Sizes: Falcon 1 offered 7B, 40B and 180B; Falcon 2 launched with 11B, later followed by other families such as Falcon 3 and Falcon-H1.
  • Vision: Falcon 1 was text only; Falcon 2 added a VLM checkpoint.
  • Documentation: Falcon 2 has a published technical report and a fuller model card.
  • Repository names differ, so migration is not a drop-in path: falcon-11B is the Falcon 2 11B checkpoint.

If you are still on Falcon 1

Moving to Falcon 2 11B usually means re-testing your prompts, because tokenizer behaviour and output style differ. The licence change is the part that most often justifies the migration on its own.

Related pages

Falcon 2 licenceFalcon 2 11BFalcon 2 vs Llama 3 8B

Sources

falcon2.lol is an independent third-party site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or operated by the Technology Innovation Institute, and it does not speak for TII. Every number on this page is attributed to the source listed above.

Falcon 2 vs Falcon 1: What Changed Between Generations