A model program within an internet group
Rakuten Group operates services across commerce, fintech, digital content and communications. Its AI work includes both developing language models and applying AI to those services. The organization here is the group, rather than Rakuten Mobile alone or the Rakuten AI model name. [1][3]
Japanese adaptation with an explicit lineage
The Rakuten AI 7B release provided base, instruction-tuned and chat checkpoints under Apache 2.0. Rakuten described continuing the training of Mistral-7B-v0.1 with Japanese and English data, including changes to tokenization. This was adaptation of an existing base model, not a claim that the original architecture came from Rakuten. [2]
A portfolio rather than one checkpoint
Rakuten’s model overview describes later mixture-of-experts and smaller-model work. Different sizes and deployment paths serve different tasks and resource budgets. The public checkpoint record gives researchers inspectable artifacts, while commercial applications add services around models. Neither the family name nor a benchmark at launch establishes performance for every Japanese business task. [3][2]
Sources
- Our Businesses
Rakuten Group · retrieved Oct 23, 2026
- Rakuten Releases High-Performance Open Large Language Models Optimized for the Japanese Language
Rakuten Group · Mar 21, 2024
- Large Language Model
Rakuten Group · retrieved Oct 23, 2026