PFN's PLaMo Translation update hits frontier-level Japanese accuracy at under 1/10 the cost
DavidBennett__ · x · 2026-10-07
Preferred Networks (PFN) shipped a major update to its AI translation service PLaMo™ Translation, now built on the latest third-generation PLaMo model.
- Accuracy & cost: PFN claims Japanese translation accuracy on par with frontier models like Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6.1 Sol, and GPT-6 Astra, beating DeepL and Google Translate on its own benchmarks, at roughly 14 JPY per 100k characters — under 1/10 the cost of comparable services (estimated from PLaMo API pricing since the service has no public API).
- Languages: expanded from Japanese-English only to 53 languages.
- New feature: a meeting translation mode with real-time transcription in 15 languages for cross-border business calls.
Training compute was several hundred times that of the previous generation, with architectural optimizations for Japanese processing.
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