OpenAI is expanding to Japan, with the opening of a new Tokyo office and plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language.
The ChatGPT-maker opened its first international office in London last year, followed by its inaugural European Union (EU) office in Dublin a few months later. Tokyo will represent OpenAI’s first office in Asia and fourth globally (including its San Francisco HQ), with CEO Sam Altman highlighting Japan’s “rich history of people and technology coming together to do more” among its reasons for setting up a formal presence in the region.
OpenAI’s global expansion efforts so far have been fairly strategic, insofar as the U.K. is a major hub for AI talent while the EU is currently driving the AI regulatory agenda. Japan has been one of the bigger developers and adopters of humanoid robots and other AI-powered hardware, and it figured prominently during Altman’s world tour last year, when he visited with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and talked about OpenAI’s intention of opening an office in 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 choice to lead the new hub is notable. OpenAI Japan will be headed up 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, growing OpenAI’s profile and business with enterprises is a primary target with this latest expansion.
Enterprising
As president of OpenAI Japan, Nagasaki will be tasked with building a local team on the ground to double down on OpenAI’s business in the country. The company already counts Daikin (an industrial company best known for air conditioners), Rakuten, and Toyota among customers using OpenAI’s enterprise-focused version of ChatGPT, which OpenAI says includes additional privacy, data analysis, and customization options on top of the standard consumer-grade ChatGPT.
OpenAI says ChatGPT is also being 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 latest version of the underlying GPT large language model (LLM) for Japanese specifically will give it enhanced understanding of the nuances within the Japanese language, including cultural comprehension which should make it more effective particularly in business settings such as customer service and content creation. OpenAI comes with giant name recognition at the moment, but won’t be without competitors: SoftBank is also hoping to build and capitalize on the current enterprise vogue for AI with last November’s launch of SB Intuitions, which aims to build Large Language Models and generative AI services natively in Japanese.
OpenAI also says that its custom model comes with improved performance, which means it should work faster and be more cost effective than its predecessor.
For now, OpenAI is giving early access to the GPT-4 custom model to some local businesses, with access gradually opened up via the OpenAI API “in the coming months.”
