Fujitsu partners with Cohere to develop Japanese language AI services

Fujitsu has launched a new strategic partnership with security-focused enterprise AI specialist Cohere to develop and provide new LLMs, including a new Japanese model called ‘Takane’.

As part of the move, Fujitsu said it has made a “significant investment” in the Canadian business alongside plans to jointly develop new AI technology with advanced Japanese language capabilities.

Fujitsu will become the exclusive provider of jointly developed services on the global market and will provide the fruits of the partnership to customers via its cloud-based operation platform, Fujitsu Data Intelligence PaaS, as well as Fujitsu Uvance, its cross-industry business model designed to tackle social issues.

In an announcement, Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO at Cohere, described the partnership as 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,” he explained.

“We are incredibly excited that our work with Fujitsu will help to unlock the enormous potential of Cohere’s technology to power the next generation of Japanese businesses.”

The partnership will see the pair jointly develop an advanced Japanese language model – tentatively dubbed ‘Takane’ – based on Cohere’s frontier enterprise-grade LLM, which Fujitsu will provide through its Kozuchi AI productivity services from September.

Aimed at private environments such as private clouds, Takane will be based on Command R+, Cohere’s latest multilingual LLM that includes enhanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities to help mitigate hallucinations.

To be developed as a service for those that require high security, the models will combine Fujitsu’s own expertise in Japanese language training and fine-tuning capabilities with Cohere’s enterprise-specific technologies to meet specific industry needs and boost productivity.

Fujitsu said it also plans to leverage Cohere’s Embed and Rerank models to provide advanced enterprise search applications and RAG technology that help organizations unlock business value from their data.

Additionally, Fujitsu’s AI amalgamation technology will be combined as part of Takane models developed through the Cohere collaboration and various models for specific domains and existing machine learning models.

“We are very pleased to strengthen our generative AI for enterprises portfolio through this partnership with Cohere,” commented Vivek Mahajan, Fujitsu’s corporate vice president, CTO, and CPO.

“Fujitsu has developed a knowledge graph extended RAG technology for logical inferences and a generative AI amalgamation technology for automatic generation of specialized generative AI models to meet the diverse needs of companies.

“Combining these with Cohere's latest highly secure enterprise LLMs, we aim to provide businesses with powerful and adaptable AI solutions that address specific needs and accelerate the adoption of generative AI globally.”