PFN

Preferred Networks (PFN) is Japan's leading AI company, founded in 2014 by Toru Nishikawa (Chairman) and Daisuke Okanohara (CEO). Valued at 300B+ yen (~$2B+) with strategic investors Toyota, FANUC, NTT, and SBI Group. Pioneered Optuna (10K+ stars) and the Chainer framework (precursor to define-by-run paradigm). Develops the MN-Core custom AI chip (topped Green500 3x).

The PLaMo model family, developed under Japan's GENIAC national program, progressed from PLaMo-13B (2023, Apache 2.0) through PLaMo-100B (Oct 2024, 2T tokens, NEDO-funded, beats GPT-4 on Japanese benchmarks) to the hybrid PLaMo 2 (Sep 2025, Mamba2 + Sliding Window Attention, up to 31B/6T tokens). PLaMo 2.1-8B matches PLaMo-100B quality at 7x less compute. PLaMo 3 (joint with NICT/SAKURA Internet) adds reasoning capabilities. PLaMo Translate was adopted by Japan's Digital Agency for government use.

PFN also operates Matlantis (universal atomistic simulator, 96 elements, 20M x faster than DFT, 90+ corporate users) and the PFCP cloud platform powered by MN-Core chips via a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corp and IIJ.