Catalysing AI Innovation for
Southeast Asia

SEA-LION is a family of efficient, open-source, multilingual, multimodal language models designed to understand Southeast Asia’s diverse languages, cultures, and contexts.

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Latest Announcements

SEA-LION Insights

Stay up to date with the latest developments from SEA-LION. Our blog features updates on model releases, research breakthroughs, datasets, benchmarks, and stories from the growing Southeast Asian AI community.

Recently published:

Nemotron-SEA-LION v4.8

We are thrilled to announce the Nemotron-SEA-LION-v4.8 suite of models, developed in deep technical collaboration with NVIDIA. This release marks two firsts for the SEA-LION series: its first Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and its first Nemotron-based models.

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SEA-Guard

Introducing our new collection of safety-focused Large Language Models (LLMs) built upon the SEA-LION family. SEA-Guard models are specifically fine-tuned to detect, moderate, and handle content according to Southeast Asian cultural norms and safety standards. From lightweight visual safety models for edge deployment to high-capacity multimodal models for complex content analysis—there’s a SEA-Guard model for every safety need.

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Model Catalogue

Explore our family of models and see our latest release.

Explore Model

Project ATLAS

Join our global community-driven open platform to help builders make AI more representative, more locally useful, and safer for the communities. Contribute and explore datasets powering future models.

Explore ATLAS

SEA-HELM Leaderboard

Track model performance and gain insights with SEA-HELM, assessing large language models across Southeast Asian languages, chat, instruction-following, regional tasks, and English capabilities.

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Capabilities

Powering linguistic and cultural understanding across Southeast Asia

SEA-LION is designed to capture the intricate linguistic and cultural nuances of under-represented population groups and low resource languages across Southeast Asian communities.

Regional Excellence

  • Purpose-built on the latest State-of-the-Art open-model architecture and trained with Southeast Asian tokens to anchor regional representation on frontier design

Multilingual, Multicultural, Multimodal

  • Performant in 11+ SEA languages.
  • Supports image and text inputs, enabling visual Q&A, document comprehension, and culturally aware outputs

Agentic by Design

  • Built for agentic workflows (SEA-LION v4.5 onwards), with a custom speculative decoder delivering up to 6x greater inference efficiency

Resource Efficient

  • High performance even on low infrastructure
  • Quantised models are deployable on lightweight setups including laptops and edge devices

Safe & Secure

  • Safety-tuned for SEA contexts and complemented with safety guardrails – SEA-Guard
  • Aligned with human-curated data and calibrated to regional cultural norms and safety standards.

Open & Collaborative

  • Fully open-source and community-driven
  • Framework-agnostic for research and commercial use, available on Hugging Face, Ollama and all major hyperscalers

SEA-LION’s Guiding Principles

Choice

Users have the freedom to choose how to interact:

  • Closed vs Open
  • Build vs Buy
  • East vs West
  • Model
  • Independence

Open

Users have visibility on how it is being built:

  • Data
  • Models
  • Evaluations
  • Code Checkpoints

Responsible

Users understand the ethical reasoning behind how our models are:

  • Built
  • Aligned
  • Deployed

Inclusive

Users have a model that is relevant for their demographics:

  • Representative
  • Aligned
  • Collaborative