- NEC Corporation has announced plans to launch its lightweight large language model (LLM) in the Spring of 2024 with the goal of providing a perfect environment for the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) customized for each customer’s business.
- This development will dramatically expand the environment for operations transformation across a wide range of industries, including healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.
- NEC is currently developing a large-scale AI model with 100 billion parameters, a significant improvement on the conventional 13 billion parameter models.
- The company aims to earn approximately 50 billion yen from its generative AI-related businesses over the next three years.
NEC’s new developments aim to provide services that are designed to suit the unique needs of each customer, centered on a specialized model drawing from NEC’s industry and business knowledge. This move could bring significant transformation to the operations of various industries. Besides, NEC aims to promote the use of generative AI through managed application programming interface (API) services across companies and industries.
The new enhancements to NEC’s LLM include doubling the amount of high-quality training data and improving its Japanese dialogue skill capabilities. This LLM can handle up to 300,000 Japanese characters, allowing its use for a wide variety of operations, including processing large volumes of documents such as business manuals.
NEC is also developing a new architecture that will allow for the creation of new AI models by flexibly combining models as per the input data and tasks. The company aims to establish a scalable foundation model that can expand the number of parameters and extend functionality, responding better to specialized AI needs and linking with a range of AI models from other companies and partners.
In addition to its internal efforts, NEC has also started a collaboration with Robust Intelligence on the LLM Risk Assessment Project. The goal of this collaboration is to provide safe and reliable LLM, risk assessed according to global standards. By doing so, NEC intends to continue to innovate and stay ahead in the rapidly growing field of Generative AI.
