# Sabi'a-2: A New Generation of Portuguese Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09887 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09887/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09617/) (2023)
- [SeaLLMs -- Large Language Models for Southeast Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00738/) (2023)
- [Typhoon: Thai Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13951/) (2023)
- [Taiwan LLM: Bridging the Linguistic Divide with a Culturally Aligned Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17487/) (2023)
- [Evaluating GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 Models on Brazilian University Admission Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17003/) (2023)
- [BLUEX: A benchmark based on Brazilian Leading Universities Entrance eXams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05410/) (2023)
- [PersianLLaMA: Towards Building First Persian Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15713/) (2023)
- [Evaluating GPT-4's Vision Capabilities on Brazilian University Admission Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14169/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [FuxiTranyu: A Multilingual Large Language Model Trained with Balanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06273/) (2024)
- [Building High-Quality Datasets for Portuguese LLMs: From Common Crawl Snapshots to Industrial-Grade Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08824/) (2025)
- [Juru: Legal Brazilian Large Language Model from Reputable Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18140/) (2024)
- [PoETa v2: Toward More Robust Evaluation of Large Language Models in Portuguese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17808/) (2025)
- [Performance in a dialectal profiling task of LLMs for varieties of Brazilian Portuguese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10991/) (2024)
- [BRoverbs -- Measuring how much LLMs understand Portuguese proverbs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08960/) (2025)
- [CALM: Culturally Self-Aware Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03483/) (2026)
- [Prosa: Rubric-Based Evaluation of LLMs on Real User Chats in Brazilian Portuguese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01630/) (2026)
- [Language Models for Portuguese: A Systematic Mapping Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18138/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Sabi'a-2, a family of large language models trained on Portuguese texts. The models are evaluated on a diverse range of exams, including entry-level tests for Brazilian universities, professional certification exams, and graduate-level exams for various disciplines such as accounting, economics, engineering, law and medicine. Our results reveal that our best model so far, Sabi'a-2 Medium, matches or surpasses GPT-4's performance in 23 out of 64 exams and outperforms GPT-3.5 in 58 out of 64 exams. Notably, specialization has a significant impact on a model's performance without the need to increase its size, allowing us to offer Sabi'a-2 Medium at a price per token that is 10 times cheaper than GPT-4. Finally, we identified that math and coding are key abilities that need improvement.