Cohere Partners with Fujitsu to Build LLMs with Japanese Language Capabilities

Canada-based enterprise AI startup Cohere has entered into a strategic partnership with Japanese information technology giant Fujitsu. Under the engagement, Cohere has received a “significant investment” from Fujitsu and will be working closely with the technology major to build LLMs and solutions with Japanese language capabilities.

The move will enable enterprises and startups in the region to leverage powerful Japanese LLMs across their products and provide an improved experience to customers and employees.

In a media statement, Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, said, “This strategic partnership with Fujitsu is a truly important step in offering world-class LLM capabilities to one of the most important enterprise markets in the world. For AI technologies to reach their full potential, we need to be able to meet enterprises where they are, whether that means in their own cloud environment or in the languages that they do business in.”

The debut LLM of this partnership is tentatively dubbed ‘Takane’ (meaning mountain peak in English). Takane will be based on Command R+, which is Cohere’s most advanced and scalable large language model (LLM) designed specifically for real-world business applications.

With this strategic partnership, Cohere will bring its AI models to the table, which Fujitsu will leverage, using its expertise in Japanese language training and fine-tuning technologies.

Fujitsu is positive that the Takane Japanese LLM model will boost local enterprises’ productivity and efficiency across functions. However, it will not be the only Cohere model deployed under this arrangement.

The company also plans to leverage Cohere’s Embed and Rerank models to build advanced enterprise search applications and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.

Also, Fujitsu will serve as the exclusive provider of the Japanese language models and services developed with Cohere. 

The company shared that it will provide Takane for enterprises’ private environments in September 2024 via its Kozuchi cloud-based AI platform.