rinna
Japan's open-weight AI catalog — commercial API discontinued in 2026
Overview
rinna Co., Ltd., the Tokyo lab spun out of Microsoft Japan in 2020, shut its commercial API, Tamashiru Custom, and Koemotion TTS down in 2026. Its 60+ open-weight Hugging Face models remain downloadable, but the live business now is AI Rinna, an entertainment character signed to Avex.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
What you can produce with rinna
- Open-weight Japanese language models (GPT-NeoX 3.6B, Bakeneko 32B, Youko 70B) downloadable from Hugging Face under permissive licences
- Instruction-tuned and RLHF/PPO-aligned variants of core models for conversational deployment
- Japanese ASR models (NUE-ASR, wav2vec2, HuBERT) for speech-to-text pipelines
- Japanese CLIP and Stable Diffusion models for image-language tasks
- Managed REST API (rinna Developers) for text generation, TTS, and text-to-image in Japanese
- Tamashiru Custom enterprise service delivering a customer-dedicated fine-tuned LLM environment with rinna researcher support
- Conversational AI avatar platform for public-sector and enterprise deployments
ASEAN Perspective
rinna in Southeast Asia
rinna's core competency is Japanese-language AI, making it highly relevant for Japanese-market teams in ASEAN — particularly Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, where Japanese enterprise investment is significant. Its July 2025 MOU with the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry (Project TRINA) to deploy a Tagalog- and English-capable AI avatar for public services is a meaningful ASEAN foothold, though it relies on rinna's conversational AI platform rather than its open-source LLMs. For Southeast Asian developers needing Japanese-language generation or ASR, rinna models are among the strongest freely available options; for Bahasa, Thai, or Vietnamese tasks, rinna does not yet offer competitive multilingual alternatives and global providers or regional models from mGPT or SeaLLM are better suited.
Note: rinna's commercial B2B products (Developers API, Tamashiru Custom, Koemotion TTS) were discontinued in 2026; the company's live business is now its AI Rinna entertainment persona.
rinna built one of the deepest open-weight catalogs in Japanese NLP: GPT-2 through Bakeneko 32B, all under permissive licenses, with real benchmark numbers behind them (Bakeneko scores 79.18 on the Japanese LM Evaluation Harness). That catalog is still there and still free to pull from Hugging Face. What's gone, as of 2026, is the commercial side. The rinna Developers API, Tamashiru Custom enterprise fine-tuning, and the Koemotion text-to-speech product have all been discontinued. The company's active business now is AI Rinna, the 2015 Microsoft Japan chatbot persona turned Avex Entertainment recording artist — closer to a virtual idol act than an AI vendor. Developers who want free Japanese-language weights to self-host still have a solid reason to look here. Anyone evaluating rinna as a commercial API or enterprise LLM partner should know that door closed sometime before mid-2026, with no announced plan to reopen it.
What people say
Sixty-plus open-weight models, permissive licenses, over six million downloads — on paper rinna still looks like Japan's most productive AI lab. Dig into 2026 and the picture splits in two. The research side (GPT-2, GPT-NeoX 3.6B, Youri, Nekomata, Youko, Baku, Bakeneko 32B) is real and still free to pull from Hugging Face; Bakeneko's 79.18 on the Japanese LM Evaluation Harness is a genuinely strong number for a 32B model built on a Qwen 2.5 base.
The commercial side is gone. rinna Developers (the text/speech/image API), Tamashiru Custom (enterprise fine-tuning), and Koemotion (text-to-speech) have all been discontinued — the endpoints don't resolve and the pricing pages are dead. What's left as rinna's live business is AI Rinna, the old Microsoft Japan chatbot character, now signed to Avex Entertainment as a singer. That's a legitimate pivot for a consumer entertainment brand, but it means rinna is no longer a vendor you can put on an enterprise shortlist for Japanese-language inference.
Bottom line: treat rinna as an open-weight archive, not a service. Fine for a research team that wants to self-host Japanese GPT-NeoX or Bakeneko checkpoints. Not an option if you were counting on a managed API — that business closed sometime before mid-2026, with no public roadmap to bring it back. The 2025 Philippines DTI deployment (Project TRINA) still shows on rinna's site but reads as a legacy case study rather than an active government-AI practice.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- rinna's origins trace to a LINE chatbot launched in 2015 by Microsoft Japan — an AI persona modelled on a chatty high-school girl that attracted tens of millions of conversations before the company spun out.
- rinna follows a 'Japanese mythology naming' convention for its model series: Youri (友理), Nekomata (猫又 — a supernatural cat), Youko (妖狐 — fox spirit), Baku (獏 — dream-eating creature), and Bakeneko (化け猫 — shape-shifting cat).
- The Bakeneko 32B (released February 2025) was continually pre-trained on approximately 18 billion Japanese and English tokens on top of Alibaba's Qwen 2.5-32B checkpoint — improving Japanese tokenisation efficiency from 0.40 to ~0.24 tokens per byte.
- rinna's japanese-gpt-neox-3.6b-instruction-ppo (released May 2023) was among the first Japanese-language models trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF/PPO), predating many western open-source RLHF releases at that scale.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including rinna's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with rinna unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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