Japan Strikes Back

As Western artificial intelligence developers accelerate international expansion, Japan, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is shaping up to be a key battleground. 

ChatGPT and Gemini are already popular there. Anthropic is preparing to open a Tokyo office after appointing a Japan country head last month. Canada-based Cohere also hired a Japan country manager last month.

But Japan’s government and domestic AI companies are ramping up their efforts too. Last week, a government-funded research institute and two local firms announced an initiative to build homegrown models, apps and infrastructure. 

While that may sound snoozy at first blush, it’s not: Preferred Networks, one of Japan’s few AI unicorns, will be able to train models on vast databases owned by the government institute, including more than 70 billion pages of Japanese language data. That could help the resulting AI beat foreign-made alternatives in terms of understanding Japan’s language, culture, customs, history and legal system.