SB Intuitions (SoftBank AI)
SoftBank's Japanese-first Sarashina models, now with a free public beta
Overview
SB Intuitions is SoftBank Corp.'s wholly owned AI company in Tokyo, building the Japanese-first Sarashina language models from scratch. It publishes open weights on Hugging Face (mostly MIT, some non-commercial), sells Sarashina through SoftBank's enterprise API and Cloud PF Type A, and since October 2026 runs a free public beta of the Sarashina3 models at sarashina.ai.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete.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.
- API access to Sarashina3 mini, nano, embedding, rerank, guard and translate
- Web chat with web search and writing
- Japanese-English translation
- Google account sign-in, no application
- Sarashina1, Sarashina2 and Sarashina2.2 language models
- Sarashina2 and 2.2 vision models
- Sarashina2.2-OCR
- Japanese ModernBERT encoders
- Sarashina2-8x70B and Sarashina2.1-1B
- Sarashina embedding v1 and v2
- Sarashina2.2-TTS
- Derived models must start with "Sarashina"; products show "Built with Sarashina"
- Chat Completion API
- Embeddings API
- Sarashina mini model
- Sarashina3 mini, nano, guard, embedding and rerank
- Data kept in SoftBank's Japanese data centres
Use cases
What you can produce with SB Intuitions (SoftBank AI)
- Free, rate-limited API access to six Sarashina3 models through the Sarashina Service beta
- Japanese-English translation and AI chat in the Sarashina Service web app
- MIT-licensed Sarashina1, 2 and 2.2 language models for self-hosted Japanese inference
- Japanese document OCR and image understanding with the Sarashina vision and OCR models
- Enterprise chat and embeddings over the SoftBank Sarashina API
- RAG building blocks (embedding, rerank and guard models) on SoftBank's Cloud PF Type A
ASEAN Perspective
SB Intuitions (SoftBank AI) in Southeast Asia
SB Intuitions' models are currently optimised for Japanese language and Japanese enterprise deployments, with no publicly confirmed ASEAN-language support or regional partnerships as of mid-2026. However, the Japan AI Foundation Model Development consortium's Physical AI ambitions are directly relevant to ASEAN manufacturing: Japan supplies roughly 70% of the world's industrial robots, and factories across Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia rely on Japanese automation equipment that this initiative aims to make AI-native. ASEAN governments tracking data-sovereignty approaches to AI may find the Japan model of public-private co-investment and onshore data processing instructive. Any practical ASEAN deployment of Sarashina or Physical AI products will depend on future regional partnerships not yet announced.
SB Intuitions is the most direct route to a Japanese-built model family kept on Japanese infrastructure. The Sarashina1, 2 and 2.2 weights are MIT-licensed and genuinely usable, and the free Sarashina Service beta, launched 13 October 2026, finally lets anyone try the newer Sarashina3 models through an API without a sales call.
Check the licence per model: the embedding, speech and 8x70B releases are non-commercial and carry naming rules. Enterprise pricing is quoted, the beta has rate limits and no announced end date, and SB Intuitions publishes no benchmarks against global frontier models. Worth evaluating for Japanese-language work with residency requirements.
What we found
SB Intuitions is the generative-AI company SoftBank Corp. set up in Tokyo in 2023 to build Japanese-first language models from scratch under the Sarashina name. It is wholly owned by SoftBank Corp. Its pitch is domestic control: the company says all of its training data is kept in data centres in Japan, and SoftBank has framed Sarashina on its own cloud as a way for enterprises and local governments to keep data sovereignty.
The product line has moved quickly. A hosted Sarashina API, serving a lighter model called Sarashina mini that drew on work behind a 460-billion-parameter flagship, opened to enterprise customers on 28 November 2025 after a trial with about 20,000 SoftBank employees. On 30 June 2026 the Sarashina3 series (mini, nano, guard, embedding and rerank) arrived on SoftBank's Cloud PF Type A, which runs on Oracle Alloy in SoftBank's Japanese data centres. Then on 13 October 2026 SB Intuitions opened Sarashina Service at sarashina.ai, a free beta with Google sign-in, rate-limited API access to six Sarashina3 models including a new translation model, and a web chat for conversation and Japanese-English translation. No end date for the beta and no later price have been announced, and beta usage data may be used to improve the models.
The open weights are useful, but the licences split. The Sarashina1, Sarashina2 and Sarashina2.2 language models, the vision models, an OCR model and Japanese ModernBERT encoders are MIT-licensed on Hugging Face. The 8x70B mixture model, Sarashina2.1-1B, the embedding models and the Sarashina2.2-TTS speech model carry a non-commercial agreement that also requires derived models to start with the name Sarashina and products to show "Built with Sarashina".
The company is also branching out: Med-Sarashina, a medical model in joint research with Juntendo University since June 2026, safety research with Japan's NICT, and a robot-motion model selected in September 2026 for the government's GENIAC programme. No price is published for any commercial Sarashina service.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Notable facts
- Sarashina is named after a classic 11th-century Japanese diary, reflecting the goal of encoding Japanese cultural depth into its models.
- SoftBank deployed a 4,000-GPU Nvidia B200 DGX SuperPod cluster specifically to train Japanese LLMs, one of Japan's largest AI compute deployments.
- The Japan AI Foundation Model Development consortium targets a 1-trillion-parameter model focused on controlling robots, not generating text.
- Japan controls approximately 70% of global industrial robotics manufacturing, giving the Physical AI consortium an unusually rich proprietary training data source.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including SB Intuitions (SoftBank AI)'s official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with SB Intuitions (SoftBank AI) 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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