Rakuten AI 3.0: 700B Parameter MoE Released Apache 2.0 as Japan's First Large-Scale Open Model

greeden.me / Rakuten·medium signal

Rakuten released AI 3.0 on March 17 as part of Japan's GENIAC national AI project — a ~700B parameter Mixture-of-Experts model optimized for Japanese language tasks that tops domestic benchmarks and is free for commercial use under Apache 2.0. This is the first Japanese open-weight model at this parameter scale and signals that national open model programs outside the US and China are now shipping competitive infrastructure. The Apache 2.0 license makes it viable for enterprise fine-tuning and deployment without licensing friction.