LLM-jp-4 8B

LLM-jp-4 8B is an open-source large language model released in 2026 by LLM-jp, a consortium of over 1,000 researchers organized under Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII). It is part of Japan's strategic push for sovereign AI infrastructure, trained on a curated dataset of over 1.2 trillion Japanese tokens spanning classical texts, web content, and legal, medical, and governmental corpora.

The model ships under Apache 2.0 in base, instruct, and thinking variants, with 64k context in the thinking version. Coverage reports the series outperforming GPT-3.5-turbo on Japanese language understanding benchmarks, with particular strength in nuance detection, honorific usage, and contextual ambiguity resolution. An NII press release dated April 3, 2026 announced the release.