NTT’s Large Language Model “tsuzumi”: A High-performance and Low-energy-consumption Large Language Model with Expertise in Specific Fields

Since ChatGPT, OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, was released in November 2022, large language models (LLMs) have rapidly drawn worldwide attention, and new LLMs have been announced one after another.While the "bright side" of such LLMs, namely, high performance, has been brought to attention, their "dark side," namely, increased energy consumption, has also been pointed out.On November 1, 2023, NTT's LLM called "tsuzumi" was announced.It was developed with a particular vision in mind, creating a future in which many and small LLMs having different characteristics are combined, rather than creating one huge and monolithic LLM, to achieve social well-being through AI-human collaboration.Thus, tsuzumi has made it possible to achieve the bright side and address the dark side of LLMs simultaneously, and its commercial service was launched on March 25, 2024.We interviewed Kyosuke Nishida, a senior distinguished researcher at NTT Human Informatics Laboratories, about how the tsuzumi project was launched, features of tsuzumi, trends in LLMs, and his thoughts on the challenges of competing in a highly competitive market.