Falcon 3 · TII
Fine-tuning Falcon 3 7B
What does it take to fine-tune Falcon 3 7B?
Falcon 3 7B needs 16 GB for half-precision LoRA training and 12 GB in four-bit, and 14 GB to serve. It supports supervised fine-tuning, preference tuning (dpo), under the TII Falcon LLM licence. The cheapest qualifying class is RTX 3080 at $0.09 per GPU-hour.
The mainstream Falcon 3, sitting alongside Mistral 7B and the Llama and Qwen 8Bs on memory footprint. Its argument is consistency with the rest of its family rather than a benchmark advantage over those.
What to know before choosing it
Sits alongside Mistral 7B and the Llama and Qwen 8Bs on memory footprint, and its argument against them is consistency with the rest of its family rather than a benchmark advantage. If you have standardised on Falcon 3 across sizes, staying inside it is worth something.
If you have not, the models around it have larger surrounding ecosystems and this one has no specific advantage to offset that. It is an honest recommendation to look at the alternatives first.
Specification
| Parameters | 7B |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Dense |
| Size tier | Mid |
| LoRA training memory | 16 GBHalf precision, frozen base |
| QLoRA training memory | 12 GBFour-bit base, higher-precision adapter |
| Serving memory | 14 GBHalf precision, before attention cache |
| Objectives | SFT, DPO |
| Licence | TII Falcon LLM |
| Repository | tiiuae/Falcon3-7B-Base |
What it costs to train
Every class with enough memory for four-bit training, cheapest first. Total cost is the rate multiplied by wall time, so the cheapest rate is not always the cheapest run — a faster class that finishes sooner frequently wins.
| GPU class | VRAM | Training / hr | Serving / hr | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 3080 | 12 GB | $0.09 | $0.11 | QLoRA only |
| RTX 4000 Ada | 20 GB | $0.09 | $0.11 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| L4 | 24 GB | $0.17 | $0.20 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| RTX 3090 | 24 GB | $0.22 | $0.26 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| RTX 4090 | 24 GB | $0.38 | $0.43 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| A40 | 48 GB | $0.42 | $0.48 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| RTX 6000 Ada | 48 GB | $0.61 | $0.71 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| A6000 | 48 GB | $0.65 | $0.75 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| L40S | 48 GB | $0.78 | $0.90 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| A100 40 GB | 40 GB | $1.17 | $1.35 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| A100 80 GB | 80 GB | $1.68 | $1.94 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| H100 80 GB | 80 GB | $2.59 | $2.99 | LoRA and QLoRA |
| H200 | 141 GB | $4.55 | $5.25 | LoRA and QLoRA |
Half-precision LoRA needs 16 GB, so the cheapest class for it is RTX 4000 Ada at $0.09 per hour. Below that, training has to be quantised.
Serving fits on RTX 4000 Ada at $0.11 per hour — before the attention cache, which grows with context length and concurrency.
Good starting point for
- Staying inside the Falcon family across sizes
- General instruction following
Preference tuning on this model
Preference tuning holds a frozen reference copy of the model alongside the one being trained, so budget roughly 32 GB rather than 16 GB. That is the thing that catches people out — supervised training on this model fits on a class that preference tuning will overflow.
Other sizes in this family
| Model | Params | QLoRA | Objectives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Falcon 3 1B | 1B | 3 GB | SFT, DPO |
| Falcon 3 3B | 3B | 6 GB | SFT, DPO |
| Falcon 3 10B | 10B | 16 GB | SFT, DPO |
Comparable sizes elsewhere
Frequently asked questions
How much VRAM does it take to fine-tune Falcon 3 7B?
16 GB for half-precision LoRA and 12 GB for four-bit QLoRA. Serving needs 14 GB. Preference tuning roughly doubles the training figure, because a frozen reference model is held alongside the one being trained.
What is the cheapest way to fine-tune Falcon 3 7B?
Four-bit QLoRA on RTX 3080 at $0.09 per GPU-hour is the cheapest class that meets the 12 GB threshold. Note that quantised training is slower per step, so a faster class sometimes costs less over the whole run.
Can I download the weights after fine-tuning Falcon 3 7B?
Yes. Every finished run exposes its trained weights for download, and publishing to a model hub is a single call with a generated model card recording the base model and version the adapter applies to.
What licence does Falcon 3 7B carry?
TII Falcon LLM. The licence follows the fine-tune — a derivative inherits the base model’s terms, and those terms pass to anyone you give the model to.
Last verified 6 August 2026. Memory thresholds are the platform's own admission limits.
Fine-tune Falcon 3 7B
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