"Beats Chat GPT and Eliza in Japanese"
Higher smartphone usability with fewer parameters
Japan's NTT announced that it will commercialize a large language model (LMM) generative artificial intelligence (AI) service specialized in Japanese in March next year. Dubbed the 'Japanese version of Chat GPT,' it is being promoted as capable of delivering similar performance with far fewer parameters than Chat GPT, drawing significant attention to its potential success.
According to IT media Nikkei Cross Tech on the 2nd, NTT announced the day before that it will commercialize its independently developed LMM, 'Tsuzumi,' primarily for corporations and NTT-affiliated companies starting in March next year. Tsuzumi means a traditional Japanese drum, a percussion instrument, and is known to be named after its characteristics of being lightweight yet producing a strong sound and being easy to tune.
Like the drum's characteristics, NTT plans to offer Tsuzumi in two models: a 'lightweight version' with 7 billion parameters and an 'ultra-lightweight version' with 600 million parameters. Generally, LMMs use tens of billions to hundreds of billions of parameters, and AI performance is considered better with more parameters. Considering that Chat GPT has 175 billion parameters, Tsuzumi's parameter count is extremely low.
While limiting the number of parameters, Tsuzumi will be available only in Japanese and English. However, NTT explains that it has fully focused on Japanese performance by improving the quality of Japanese pre-training data through research.
NTT stated, "According to the Japanese performance benchmark we conducted, the lightweight version outperformed GPT-3.5 developed by the US-based OpenAI," adding, "The training cost can be significantly reduced to 1/25th of that of the GPT model." It is currently known to be aiming to improve performance toward GPT-4.
A table comparing Japanese language performance between Tsuzumi and other LMMs released by NTT. It emphasizes that it outperformed Chat GPT and Eliza. (Photo by NTT)
NTT is promoting the results of comparing the Japanese performance of Tsuzumi with Chat GPT 3.5 and Eliza on its official website. According to this, Tsuzumi won the performance competition against Chat GPT 3.5 52.5% of the time and against Eliza 71.3% of the time.
NTT also emphasizes, "The lightweight version has the advantage of being usable on smartphones and smartwatches."
Furthermore, it added, "Tsuzumi is equipped with the ability to read and respond to images, tables, and graphs included in documents, in addition to text," and "Going forward, we will continue training including visual information and voice, and provide the service after April next year."
Tsuzumi has been undergoing internal and external evaluations since this month at NTT Docomo and NTT East Japan. For corporations, demonstration evaluations are being conducted with Kyoto University Hospital, Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance, and others. President Akira Shimada stated, "Our goal is to achieve sales exceeding 100 billion yen by 2027 with Tsuzumi alone."
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