Gate News reports that on March 17, Rakuten Group announced the launch of Rakuten AI 3.0, a Japanese-specific large language model. The company stated that this model outperforms models like GPT-4o in various Japanese benchmarks, including Japanese culture and history, and instruction adherence. It was developed based on open-source community models combined with proprietary bilingual data. However, some users on the X platform discovered that the config.json file on the Hugging Face page for this project contains entries like “model_type: deepseek_v3.” Additionally, the model’s responses tend to favor China over Japan. This discovery has sparked discussions among netizens about whether the model is based on DeepSeek and how much Japanese自主研发技术 (independent Japanese R&D technology) it includes.