SEA-LION

What is SEA-LION?

SEA-LION is a family of efficient, open-source, multilingual and multimodal language models built for Southeast Asia's linguistic diversity. It is developed by AI Singapore, a national programme supported by the National Research Foundation and hosted by the National University of Singapore.

Key capabilities of SEA-LION

• 11+ languages: Performs across more than 11 Southeast Asian languages
• Low-resource focus: Captures underrepresented communities and language groups
• Open source: Framework-agnostic for research and commercial use
• Multimodal models: Includes multimodal variants
• Mixture-of-Experts: Nemotron-SEA-LION-v4.8, built with NVIDIA, is the first MoE model in the series
• Multiple access routes: Playground, Telegram bot, Hugging Face, Ollama and API

How SEA-LION works

Users can try models in the SEA-LION Playground or a Telegram bot, download weights from Hugging Face or Ollama, or call the models through an API key from the key manager. The latest suite, Nemotron-SEA-LION-v4.8, was developed with NVIDIA.

Who uses SEA-LION?

Developers, researchers and businesses building products for Southeast Asian users who need models that understand regional languages, cultures and context.

SEA-LION pricing

The SEA-LION site does not state pricing. The models are open source and available on Hugging Face and Ollama, and API terms are set by AI Singapore.

SEA-LION alternatives

Alternatives include Typhoon for Thai-focused models, Qwen for broad multilingual open models, and Llama for general open-weight models.