OpenAI has announced plans to open an office in Tokyo and release a version of GP-4 optimized to process Japanese-language text.
The office, which the company unveiled late Sunday, is its third international hub. OpenAI previously launched branches in London and Dublin last year. More international offices may follow suit as the artificial intelligence developer works to further expand its market reach.
OpenAI’s new Tokyo hub will be led by Tadao Nagasaki, the former head of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Japanese business unit. Nagasaki disclosed in a press conference that the AI developer plans to have between 10 and 20 local employees by year’s end. Those workers will focus on “global affairs, go-to-market, communications, operations and other functions,” OpenAI detailed in a blog post.
In the long term, the office may help support the company’s product development efforts. OpenAI stated in the blog post that its local team will work not only with private sector customers but also the Japanese government and local research institutions. That raises the possibility OpenAI may partner with universities in Japan on model development projects.
In conjunction with the announcement of the new office, the company introduced a new version of GPT-4 optimized for the Japanese language. OpenAI says that the customized model can perform some tasks up to three times faster than the standard edition. Additionally, it’s more adept at translating and summarizing Japanese-language text.
OpenAI has made the model available to several early customers including the developer of Speak, one of the most popular language learning apps in Japan. Thanks to the customized version of GPT-4, Speak can now generate explanations for users up to 2.8 times faster than before. The app’s operator also reduced its inference costs.
OpenAI plans to make the new edition of GPT-4 broadly available in the coming months. It will become accessible through the company’s application programming interface, which allows enterprises to integrate its AI models into their custom software.
Besides Speak, OpenAI’s commercial products are also used by a range of other organizations in Japan. The AI developer disclosed today that Toyota Motor Corp. and Rakuten Group Inc., Japan’s largest e-commerce company, are among the customers using the enterprise version of ChatGPT. The local government of Yokosuka, a city in central Japan, has teamed up with 21 other cities including Tokyo to share ChatGPT best practices with one another.
OpenAI inaugurated its first international office in London last June. At the time, the company detailed that its local team will work on research and engineering projects as well as engage policymakers. A few months later, OpenAI established a hub in Dublin to support its cybersecurity and trust and safety efforts.
Photo: OpenAI
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