Quick Take: Shisa.AI just dropped Shisa V2 405B, a colossal 405-billion parameter LLM built on Llama 3.1, now claiming the title of Japan’s highest-performing LLM. It’s open-weight, commercially ready making it a must-see for devs needing top-tier Japanese language power.
🚀 The Crunch:
TLDR: Japan’s new open-weight champ, a 405B monster outperforming older GPT-4s on Japanese tasks. Grab it on Hugging Face if your rig can handle it, or chat with it live!
Immediate Implementation
- Test Drive Shisa V2 405B NOW: Head to chat.shisa.ai to interact with the FP8 version.
- Grab a Quantized Version: If you’ve got decent VRAM (150GB+), download a GGUF like
Q3_XSfrom Hugging Face to start experimenting. - Review Performance Claims: Check their model card for detailed benchmarks against GPT-4 and others on Japanese tasks.
- Explore Open Datasets: Access their core Japanese datasets (Apache 2.0) on Hugging Face to potentially boost your own models.
Power User Techniques
- Deploy the Full Beast (If You Dare): For max performance, the FP16 model (>800GB VRAM) is your target. Find it on Hugging Face and plan your MLOps!
- Commercial Integration: Leverage the Llama 3.1 Community License to build commercial applications with SOTA Japanese capabilities.
- Multilingual Edge: While Japanese-focused, explore its capabilities with the included Korean and Traditional Chinese data for broader applications.
- Deep Dive into Training: Keep an eye out for Shisa.AI’s upcoming technical report for insights into training massive LLMs.
Critical Pitfalls
- Underestimating Hardware: Don’t try running FP16 on a single consumer GPU. Check VRAM requirements for all versions.
- Expecting SOTA in Other Languages: Its primary strength is Japanese. Performance in KO/ZH-TW is a bonus, not the main event.
- Ignoring Benchmark Nuances: While impressive, remember benchmarks are specific. Test on your actual use cases.
- Treating it as a GPT-4 Generalist Clone: It’s specialized. Use it where its Japanese prowess shines.
🔬The Dive
A New Titan for Japanese AI: Shisa.AI isn’t just releasing another model; they’re making a statement with Shisa V2 405B. This behemoth, built on Llama 3.1 405B Instruct, is the result of intensive SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) and DPO (Direct Preference Optimization). The team proudly states it’s “the highest-performing LLM ever developed in Japan,” and their benchmarks show it surpassing GPT-4 (0603) and GPT-4 Turbo (2024-04-09), while holding its own against giants like GPT-4o (2024-11-20) and DeepSeek-V3 (0324) on Japanese MT-Bench.Crafting SOTA Performance
- Relentless Data Focus: No magic bullets here. The Shisa team emphasizes that the “single most important factor” in their success was relentlessly improving data quality for Japanese.
- Synthetic Data Mastery: They dived deep into synthetic data generation, leveraging multiple SOTA open models, followed by extensive filtering, rating, and annotation.
- Training Experiments: The team explored native language generation techniques and curriculum learning. One surprising find: simple random shuffling of multilingual samples outperformed pairwise training for their setup.
The “Sovereign AI” Drive & Open Approach
The Shisa.AI team, interestingly comprised of immigrants who’ve made Japan their home, are passionate advocates for “Sovereign AI.” They argue that homegrown AI is vital not just for cultural and linguistic preservation but also for data privacy, security, and national independence. Their philosophy is clear:
💡 “We believe the open-source approach is the only realistic way to achieve sovereignty in AI, not just for Japan, or even for nation states, but for the global community at large.“
This commitment is why Shisa V2 405B is open-weight and its core datasets are available under Apache 2.0, empowering developers and researchers globally.
What’s Next?
With the release of Shisa V2 405B and its accompanying open datasets, Shisa.AI is clearly signaling its intent to be a major player in the high-performance, open-source LLM space, particularly for Japanese. The team hints at more to come, with a full technical report on the horizon.
