The new office aims to foster collaboration with the Japanese government, local businesses, and research institutions to develop AI tools tailored to Japan’s unique requirements.

Tokyo was selected for OpenAI’s first Asian venture due to its global leadership in technology, a culture dedicated to service, and an innovative community.

“We’re excited to be in Japan which has a rich history of people and technology coming together to do more,” explained Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “We believe AI will accelerate work by empowering people to be more creative and productive, while also delivering broad value to current and new industries that have yet to be imagined.”

To ensure effective engagement within the local community and spearhead OpenAI’s initiatives in Japan, Tadao Nagasaki has been welcomed as the president of OpenAI Japan. Nagasaki’s role will involve leading commercial and market engagement efforts and building a local team to progress global affairs, go-to-market, communications, operations, and other functions catered to Japan.

OpenAI is granting local businesses early access to a customised GPT-4 model optimised for the Japanese language. This custom model boasts enhanced performance in translating and summarising Japanese text, offers cost-effectiveness, and operates up to three times faster than its predecessor. 

Speak – a leading English learning app in Japan – reportedly benefits from faster tutor explanations in Japanese with a significant reduction in token cost, facilitating improved quality of tutor feedback across more applications with higher limits per user.

The new office positions OpenAI closer to major businesses such as Daikin, Rakuten, and TOYOTA Connected, which are leveraging ChatGPT Enterprise to streamline complex business operations, assist in data analysis, and improve internal reporting.

Local governments, including Yokosuka City, are adopting the technology to enhance public service efficiency. Yokosuka City has notably expanded ChatGPT access to nearly all city employees, with 80 percent reporting productivity gains.

The Japanese government’s role as a leading voice in AI policy – especially after chairing the Hiroshima AI Process – aims to foster AI development aligned with human dignity, diversity, and inclusion, and sustainable societies. OpenAI seeks to contribute to the local ecosystem and explore AI solutions for societal challenges, such as rural depopulation and labour shortages, within the region.

OpenAI’s expansion into Japan highlights its global mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, underlining the importance of incorporating diverse perspectives.

(Photo by Jezael Melgoza)

See also: US and Japan announce sweeping AI and tech collaboration

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The ambitious plans were announced this week by President Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio following Kishida’s Official Visit to the White House.

While the leaders affirmed their commitment across a broad range of areas including defence, climate, development, and humanitarian efforts, the new technology collaborations took centre stage and underscore how the US-Japan alliance is evolving into a comprehensive global partnership underpinned by innovation.

AI takes centre stage

One of the headline initiatives is a $110 million partnership between the University of Washington, University of Tsukuba, Carnegie Mellon University, and Keio University. Backed by tech giants like NVIDIA, Arm, Amazon, and Microsoft—as well as Japanese companies—the program aims to solidify US-Japan leadership in cutting-edge AI research and development.

The US and Japan also committed to supporting each other in establishing national AI Safety Institutes and pledged future collaboration on interoperable AI safety standards, evaluations, and risk management frameworks.

In a bid to mitigate AI risks, the countries vowed to provide transparency around AI-generated and manipulated content from official government channels. Technical research and standards efforts were promised to identify and authenticate synthetic media.

Quantum leaps

Quantum technology featured prominently, with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) partnering with Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to build robust quantum supply chains.

Trilateral cooperation between the University of Chicago, University of Tokyo, and Seoul National University was also announced to train a quantum workforce and bolster competitiveness.  

The US and Japan additionally welcomed new commercial deals including Quantinuum providing Japan’s RIKEN institute with $50 million in quantum computing services over five years.

Several semiconductor initiatives were unveiled such as potential cooperation between Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC) with the US National Semiconductor Technology Center and National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program. The countries pledged to explore joint semiconductor workforce development initiatives through technical workshops.

Other announced commercial deals spanned cloud computing, telecommunications, batteries, robotics, biotechnology, finance, transportation and beyond—highlighting how the alliance is fusing public and private efforts.

Developing humans

Initiatives around STEM education exchanges, technology curriculums, entrepreneur programs, and talent circulation efforts emphasised the focus on developing human capital to power the coming wave of digital innovation.

While the technological breakthroughs grab attention, the proliferation of initiatives aimed at training, exchanging, and nurturing the innovators, researchers, and professionals across these domains could prove just as vital. The US and Japan appear determined to strategically develop and leverage human resources in lockstep with their efforts to establish cutting-edge AI, quantum, chip, and other advanced tech capabilities.

Both nations clearly recognise that building complementary ecosystems across vital technologies is essential to bolstering competitiveness, economic prosperity, and national security in an era of intensifying strategic competition.

(Photo by Tong Su)

See also: Microsoft AI opens London hub to access ‘enormous pool’ of talent

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

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NVIDIA named QuEST an Elite Service Delivery Partner in the NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) back in June.

Through NPN, QuEST has early access to NVIDIA platforms, software, solutions, workshops, and technology updates. The previous agreement only covered the USA but NVIDIA has now extended the collaboration to Japan.

Masataka Osaki, Japan Country Manager and Vice President of Corporate Sales at NVIDIA, said:

“We are pleased to welcome QuEST as an NPN Elite Partner not only in the US, but also in Japan.

The NPN Elite-level status is reserved for partners who demonstrate a history of expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.

We hope that QuEST’s solutions and services, based on NVIDIA’s AI technology, will further boost the Japanese industry.”

QuEST has wasted no time in taking advantage of the benefits of being an NPN member.

Using NVIDIA DGX systems, QuEST has trained custom vision AI models that are deployed for high-speed edge inference. Customers are able to begin enhancing their operations and decision-making through rapid proof-of-concept deployments. 

Rajeev Nair, Vice President and Head of Japan Business, QuEST Global, commented:

“We are extremely proud that our NPN Elite partner status has been extended to Japan. QuEST is already engaged with key Japanese customers in high-tech, medical devices, power, and automotive domains providing engineering and digital services. 

The NPN partnership will help us further our efforts and provide the best to our customers in Japan.” 

NVIDIA and QuEST have established a deep relationship over the years. QuEST has been part of NVIDIA’s Jetson Partner Ecosystem since 2018 and was one of the first companies to be selected for the NVIDIA Deep Learning Consulting Partnership Program.

In 2019, QuEST debuted a groundbreaking solution to detect lung cancer nodules from CT scans. The solution uses the NVIDIA Jetson platform for deep neural network training and validation to develop models that enhance the accuracy of CT image analysis compared to conventional image processing methods.

“QuEST’s collaboration with NVIDIA in Japan will help accelerate AI-based digital transformation across our customers,” added Nair. “We look forward to working with NVIDIA to spur technology-driven business innovation and growth for customers across industries.”

(Photo by Jase Bloor on Unsplash)

Find out more about Digital Transformation Week North America, taking place on 9-10 November 2021, a virtual event and conference exploring advanced DTX strategies for a ‘digital everything’ world.

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The bill, passed on Wednesday, aims to accelerate the sweeping change of regulations across various fields to support the creation of such futuristic cities.

Addressing issues such as depopulation and an aging society will be the focus of the super cities. Technologies including big data and AI will be key to successfully tackling the challenging problems.

Large amounts of data will be collected and organised from across administrative organisations.

Local governments will be selected for the ambitious projects which will launch forums with the national government and private companies to take forward the plans.

Draft plans will be created from this deep public-private collaboration that will subsequently be submitted to the state government if approved by local residents.

As with many smart city plans, there are deep concerns about the collection of personal data and what it could mean for individual privacy. Local residents are sure to want assurance that any data collection is anonymous.

A similar bill was submitted to the Diet (Japan’s decision-making institution) last year. The bill was scrapped following calls from the ruling government to review it.

The revised bill was passed on Wednesday. Given the appetite for the project across the government; the plans are now expected to progress swiftly.

(Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash)

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A Japanese artist will use a song partly composed by AI to welcome Pope Francis, who recently shared his concerns about the technology.

The song, “Protect all Life – The Signs of the Times,” is written by Jun Inoue.

Inoue is a Catholic himself and created an AI program which can generate a song in just a few seconds.

“I thought I should give everything I had to the song, so I decided to put in all the cutting-edge technology I had,” Inoue told Reuters.

Inoue wasn’t sure about using AI but decided to do so because of how intertwined the history of technology and music is. However, last month, AI News reported on Pope Francis’s concerns about artificial intelligence.

Pope Francis shared his views on AI during a Vatican conference attended by theologians, academics, and tech executives such as Mozilla co-founder Mitchell Baker and Facebook’s director of cybersecurity law Gavin Corn.

“If mankind’s so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest,” Pope Francis warned.

The Vatican hopes the conference will lead to a future document on considerations to make when developing AI technologies.

Inoue’s song is unlikely to trigger much concern from the Pope and may even help to show how AI can have a positive impact on people’s lives if used responsibly.

Earlier this year, a firm called Canny AI used deepfakes of politicians to create the following music video for John Lennon’s track Imagine:

This is, as the creators’ intended, an example of AI’s dangers when it comes to convincingly manipulating content.

Politicians and other influential figures could be made to appear like they’re saying and doing things which they’re not.

Such means could be used to sway public opinion and influence elections, and it’s going to be very difficult teaching the public not to necessarily believe their eyes and what to look out for when it comes to fake content.

Pope Francis will visit Japan from Nov 23rd-26th and marks only the second papal visit to the country.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this? Attend the co-located 5G Expo, IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

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The fallout occurred from a nuclear power plant accident is going to be devastating. Aside from the human impact, we’ve only got to look at Chernobyl to see how the environment can remain damaged for decades.

A new AI system developed in Japan, developed by a team from the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo, can accurately predict the spread of nuclear fallout up to 33 hours in advance.

Armed with this information, evacuations can begin and emergency responders can allocate resources where needed to ensure the impact is limited as much as possible.

The researchers’ system takes into account many variables, including the use of weather forecasts to predict things such as wind speed and direction to see where – and how far – nuclear material will travel.

Takao Yoshikane, a researcher from the project, said:

“Our new tool was first trained using years of weather-related data to predict where radioactivity would be distributed if it were released from a particular point.

In subsequent testing, it could predict the direction of dispersion with at least 85 percent accuracy, with this rising to 95 percent in winter when there are more predictable weather patterns.”

Nuclear reactor meltdowns result in high temperatures which catapult radioactive material up to 2,000 metres (6,562 feet) into the air. This means it can end up in the upper troposphere that can spread fallout across the world.

A video showing the AI calculating the hourly distribution of radioactive material can be found below:

The researchers’ project demonstrates how AI can be used to analyse situations and take into account many different variables.

Despite the complex calculations made, the resulting information is provided in a simple manner which can be acted upon quickly to save lives and limit the impact of disasters.

What are your thoughts on the use of AI to predict the impact of disasters? Let us know in the comments.

 Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the  IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo so you can explore the future of enterprise technology in one place.

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The study believes government departments including the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) should take responsibility for building these relationships.

“Exchanging best practices and learnings from prior initiatives is one way of strengthening cooperation,” noted the study.

Collaboration between the countries is expected to help formulate strategies which tackle social and economic challenges by adopting technologies such as AI, machine learning, and other advancements such as the IoT.

The researchers wrote in the ‘Advance artificial intelligence for growth: Leveraging AI & robotics for India’s economic transformation’ report:

“While academia and the private sector focus their research activities on finding applications with diverse usage, the public sector, with its various schemes (Digital India, Make in India, Skill India, etc.), could identify areas where specific applications of AI and robotics can be utilised to increase reach, effectiveness and efficiency, thus giving direction to existing innovation across different fields.”

Some of the other measures which could drive AI growth is the creation of data banks and exchanges which allow the streaming of information from various industries. This data can then be used for training new machine learning models.

The report also notes an overhaul of the education system – in particular, secondary school and university curricula – will help to foster AI interest and prepare the next generation workforce.

Both of these suggestions feed into the researchers’ final idea, and that’s to set up centres of excellence. At these centres, inter-disciplinary research can be conducted across fields such as law, medicine, engineering, management, and social sciences.

“Government could act as a catalyst in furthering growth by opening training centres focused on equipping young individuals with high-end skills in the field of analytics and ML, which, in turn, could be tied in with inviting data-driven global enterprises to set up their centres of excellence in India,” the researchers say.

The full report can be downloaded here (PDF)

What are your thoughts on the researchers’ suggestions? Let us know in the comments.

 Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the  IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo so you can explore the future of enterprise technology in one place.

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