Cohere teams up with Fujitsu to launch Japanese LLM ‘Takane’ for enterprises

As enterprises grow bullish on the potential of AI, companies developing foundation models are moving to expand their footprint and serve across geographies. A few months ago, OpenAI ventured into Japan with a Tokyo hub – its first in Asia, and before that, rival Anthropic partnered with Singaporean telecom giant SKT to work on a custom AI model for it. Now, Canada-based enterprise AI startup Cohere has entered into a strategic partnership with Japanese information tech 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 use powerful Japanese LLMs across their products and provide an improved experience to customers and employees. Fujitsu found success as a tech hardware company but has in recent years derived most of its revenue from IT services.

“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,” Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, said in a press statement.

One of the LLMs set to debut as part of the partnership is tentatively being called ‘Takane’ (which means mountain peak in English). It will be based on Command R+, Cohere’s most advanced and scalable large language model (LLM) designed specifically for real-world business applications.

What do we know about Cohere-Fujitsu LLM partnership?

While a definite product is yet to appear, one thing is clear: the strategic partnership will see Cohere bring its AI models to the table, while Fujitsu will build on them using its expertise in Japanese language training and fine-tuning technologies. 

Over the years, the technology major has launched multiple technologies at the intersection of data and AI. This includes a knowledge graph extended RAG system that converts large-scale enterprise data into knowledge graphs for LLMs inference, a generative AI amalgamation technology that selects the best model based on the input task or combines models for the best result and an AI auditing technology to ensure compliance with laws and company regulations.

With this partnership, the company will combine these technologies with Cohere’s frontier models, starting with enterprise-grade Command R+ – which provides best-in-class RAG with citation to reduce inaccuracies, multilingual coverage in ten key business languages and a powerful Tool Use API for automating complex workflows. This combination will provide businesses with adaptable AI solutions, leveraging best-in-class Japanese LLMs, to address specific business needs.

Fujitsu says the Takane Japanese LLM model it is building using Command R+ will boost local enterprises’ productivity and efficiency across functions. However, it won’t be the only Cohere model deployed under this arrangement.

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

Available soon

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

The company said it will provide Takane for enterprises’ private environments in September 2024, via its Kozuchi cloud-based AI platform. Beyond that, it will use its Data Intelligence PaaS, a cloud-based all-in-one operation platform, and Fujitsu Uvance, a cross-industry business model to solve social issues, offerings to take the joint solutions to customers.

While many may not consider Cohere’s partnership with Fujitsu as big a move as setting up a dedicated AI hub (like OpenAI), the approach will surely give the startup access to a broader customer base from Japan. A similar strategy has also been adopted by Perplexity, which recently partnered with Softbank to expand the reach of its AI knowledge engine.

On its part, Cohere has not shared the names of Japanese companies it is working with.