In an interview that aired on Monday, the CEO of Japan’s Rakuten announced plans to introduce the company’s own exclusive artificial intelligence language model.

It happens as the massive finance to e-commerce company seeks to collaborate with other digital companies creating the quickly expanding technology.

According to Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani, the business is developing a large language model, or LLM, of its own. These enormous algorithms, which have been trained on enormous data sets, form the foundation of artificial intelligence programmes like ChatGPT from OpenAI.

According to Mikitani, Rakuten has a wide range of industries, including banking, e-commerce, and telecommunications. As a result, the company has a lot of “very unique” data to train its LLM on.

“Nobody has a dataset like we do,” he added.

According to Mikitani, the business intends to apply the AI model internally to boost marketing and operational effectiveness by 20%.

In addition, he hopes to make the concept available for use by other companies, much like Microsoft or Amazon do.

“We can readily instruct them [businesses], package it, and offer the platform so they can fully utilise it for their enterprise,” Mikitani remarked.

Rakuten will “have something within a couple of months,” the CEO continued.

Later, a representative for Rakuten confirmed that there is no set date for launch, but that an announcement about the company’s large language model might come in the coming months.

Major Chinese and American technology companies have been releasing their own extensive language models up to this point.

Among the most well-known in the US are OpenAI, Amazon, and Google. Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have all introduced their own models in China.

Japanese businesses are now lagging behind their American and Chinese peers. But they’re making a fast effort to catch up.

This month, the telecommunications company NTT revealed that its exclusive LLM will be accessible in March.

SoftBank’s telecom division declared in November that their generative AI computing platform was live.

Japanese companies can potentially gain an advantage over their American and Chinese competitors by developing LLMs tailored to the Japanese language.

According to Mikitani, Rakuten will experience “huge profitable growth” as a result of the AI effort.

(Adapted from IndiaTimes.com)