OpenAI is expanding to Japan, with the opening of a brand new Tokyo office and plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language. The move is critical for a number of reasons. It underscores the chance the corporate sees to court business within the country. It highlights how OpenAI will likely must localize its technology on different languages because it expands. And, more pragmatically, as the professionals and cons of AI come into sharper focus for governments, their regulators and overall public discourse, having feet on the bottom becomes vital for OpenAI to grasp and influence those currents in its favor.
OpenAI comes with giant name recognition, but won’t be without competitors. SoftBank can also be hoping to construct and capitalize on the present enterprise vogue for AI with last November’s launch of SB Intuitions, which goals to construct Large Language Models and generative AI services natively in Japanese.
The ChatGPT-startup, backed by Microsoft, has just 1,200 employees globally, a tiny number if you consider that it’s currently valued at around $80 billion and is attempting to handle plenty of inbound interest. Now it’s very much taking a look at tips on how to scale to satisfy that demand. It opened its first international office in London last yr, followed by its inaugural European Union (EU) office in Dublin a number of months later. Tokyo will represent OpenAI’s first office in Asia and fourth globally (including its San Francisco HQ).
CEO Sam Altman has highlighted Japan’s “wealthy history of individuals and technology coming together to do more” amongst its reasons for establishing a proper presence within the region. But more opportunistically, OpenAI’s global expansion efforts up to now have been fairly strategic.
The U.K. is a serious hub for AI talent while the EU is currently driving the AI regulatory agenda. Japan has been one in every of the larger developers and adopters of humanoid robots and other AI-powered hardware, and it figured prominently during Altman’s world tour last yr, when he visited with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and talked about OpenAI’s intention of opening an office within the country. Japan is the present G7 chair and President of the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process, an initiative to advertise AI safety, including stronger AI governance.
OpenAI’s alternative to guide the brand new hub is notable. OpenAI Japan shall be headed up by Tadao Nagasaki, who joins the corporate after 12 years at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he led Amazon’s cloud computing division within the region. In other words, growing OpenAI’s profile and business with enterprises is a primary goal with this latest expansion.
Enterprising
As president of OpenAI Japan, Nagasaki shall be tasked with constructing an area team on the bottom to double down on OpenAI’s business within the country. The corporate already counts Daikin (an industrial company best known for air conditioners), Rakuten, and Toyota amongst customers using OpenAI’s enterprise-focused version of ChatGPT, which OpenAI says includes additional privacy, data evaluation, and customization options on top of the usual consumer-grade ChatGPT.
OpenAI says ChatGPT can also be getting used by local governments to “improve the efficiency of public services in Japan.”
GPT-4 customized for Japanese Image Credits: OpenAI
ChatGPT has long been conversant in multiple languages, including Japanese. But optimizing the most recent version of the underlying GPT large language model (LLM) for Japanese specifically will give it enhanced understanding of the nuances throughout the Japanese language, including cultural comprehension which should make it simpler particularly in business settings reminiscent of customer support and content creation.
OpenAI also says that its custom model comes with improved performance, which implies it should work faster and be less expensive than its predecessor.
For now, OpenAI is giving early access to the GPT-4 custom model to some local businesses, with access regularly opened up via the OpenAI API “in the approaching months.”
