OpenAI is expanding into Japan with the opening of a new office in Tokyo and is planning a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language.
The ChatGPT maker opened its first international office in London last year, followed a few months later by its first European Union (EU) office in Dublin. Tokyo will be OpenAI’s first office in Asia and fourth worldwide (including its headquarters in San Francisco). CEO Sam Altman cites Japan’s “rich history of people and technology working together to achieve more” as one of the reasons for establishing a formal presence in the region.
OpenAI’s global expansion efforts have been quite strategic so far, with the UK being a major hub for AI talent while the EU is currently driving the AI regulatory agenda. Japan has been one of the larger developers and adopters of humanoid robots and other AI-powered hardware, and played a prominent role during Altman’s world tour last year when he visited Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and spoke about OpenAI’s intention to open an office in Japan the country. Japan is the current G7 chair and president of the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process, an initiative to promote AI safety, including stronger AI governance.
OpenAI’s decision to lead the new hub is notable. OpenAI Japan is led by Tadao Nagasaki, who joins the company after 12 years at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he led Amazon’s cloud computing division in the region. In other words, the main goal of this latest expansion is to expand OpenAI’s profile and business with enterprises.
Enterprising
As President of OpenAI Japan, Nagasaki will be tasked with building a local team to strengthen OpenAI’s business in the country. The company already counts Daikin (an industrial company best known for air conditioning), Rakuten and Toyota among customers using OpenAI’s enterprise-focused version of ChatGPT, which OpenAI says offers additional privacy, data analysis and customization options in addition to the standard consumer-grade ChatGPT.
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT is also used by local governments to “improve the efficiency of public services in Japan.”
ChatGPT has long been proficient in multiple languages, including Japanese. However, optimizing the latest version of the underlying GPT Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Japanese will result in a better understanding of the nuances of the Japanese language, including cultural understanding, which should make it more effective, particularly in business environments such as customer service and content creation . OpenAI is enjoying a lot of notoriety at the moment, but it won’t be without competition: SoftBank is also hoping to expand and capitalize on the current enterprise AI trend with the launch of SB Intuitions last November, which aims to develop large-scale and generative language models. Services natively in Japanese.
OpenAI also says its custom model has improved performance, meaning it is said to work faster and more cost-effectively than its predecessor.
Currently, OpenAI is providing early access to the GPT-4 custom model to some local companies, with access gradually opening up through the OpenAI API.in the following months.”