Sony Research And AI Singapore Sign MOU to Collaborate on Sea-Lion LLM

Sony Research and AI Singapore today announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to collaborate on research for the Sea-Lion family of LLMs.

The aim of this research endeavor is to address the gap in the representation of Southeast Asia in the global LLM landscape and work to ensure LLMs are more globally representative of all languages and populations.

Focus on Tamil and regional languages

As we wrote previously, Sea-Lion, or Southeast Asian Languages In One Network, is specifically pre-trained and instruct-tuned for the Southeast Asia region. A new version, Sea-Lion V2, was made available for download early last month without fanfare.

Sony Research and AI Singapore will explore testing and feedback of the Sea-Lion model, particularly for Tamil and other Southeast Asian languages. They will also share best practices on LLM development and research methodologies.

The Sea-Lion project will benefit from Sony Research’s strong presence in India, which is expected to extend its expertise in LLM development on Indian languages, including Tamil, and the applicability of its recent research in the areas of speech generation, content analysis, and recognition.

Tamil is estimated to be spoken by 60-85 million people worldwide, with many in India and the Southeast Asian region.

Improving Sea-Lion

Leslie Teo, Senior Director of AI Products, AI Singapore, noted that the integration of the Sea-Lion model holds great potential to boost the performance of new solutions and lead to the refinement of existing models.

“We look forward to seeing how this collaboration will drive innovation in multilingual AI technologies,” said Teo.

“Access to LLMs that address the global landscape of language and culture has been a barrier to driving research and developing new technologies that are representative and equitable for the global populations we serve,” said Hiroaki Kitano, President of Sony Research.

“As a global company, diversity and localization are vital forces. In Southeast Asia specifically, there are more than a thousand different languages spoken by the citizens of the region. This linguistic diversity underscores the importance of ensuring AI models and tools are designed to support the needs of all populations around the world. We look forward to our collaboration with AI Singapore and the potential to make AI work for everyone.”

Image credit: iStock/Vincent_St_Thomas