SEA-LION is a family of open-source, multilingual, multimodal language models built to understand the languages, cultures and contexts of Southeast Asia. The page says it is designed to capture the linguistic and cultural nuances of under-represented population groups and low resource languages in the region.
The models are performant in more than 11 Southeast Asian languages and accept both image and text inputs, which the page says enables visual Q&A, document comprehension and culturally aware outputs. Newer releases are built for agentic workflows, and the page describes a custom speculative decoder for faster inference. Quantised versions can run on lightweight setups such as laptops and edge devices.
SEA-LION is aimed at researchers, developers and organisations that want models suited to Southeast Asian users. The page says the models are free for research and commercial use and can be used with any framework. Models are available on Hugging Face, Ollama and the major cloud providers, and the team invites users to explore, fine-tune or collaborate.
Safety is handled through SEA-Guard, a set of safety-focused models built on the SEA-LION family to detect and moderate content according to Southeast Asian cultural norms and safety standards. The page also lists a SEA-HELM leaderboard for tracking model performance across regional languages and tasks, and Project ATLAS, a community platform for contributing and exploring datasets.
SEA-LION is developed by AI Singapore, a national programme supported by the National Research Foundation and hosted by the National University of Singapore. The page lists its guiding principles as choice, openness, responsibility and inclusiveness. Pricing is not listed because the models are open source and can be downloaded and used freely.
