Japan's Rakuten Group CEO Hiroshi Mikitani (Hiroshi Mikitani) said in an interview on Monday that the company plans to launch its own artificial intelligence language model within the next two months.
Currently, the fintech and e-commerce giant is seeking to join other tech companies in developing this rapidly growing technology.
Hiroshi Mikitani said the company is developing its own large-scale language model, LLM. These are huge algorithms trained on massive data sets that support artificial intelligence applications, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
He said that Rakuten has many businesses, from banking to e-commerce and telecommunications, so it has a large amount of “very unique” data that can be used to train LLM.
“No one has a data set like ours,” he added.
Hiroshi Mikitani said the company plans to use artificial intelligence models internally to increase operational efficiency and marketing efficiency by 20%.
He also wants to offer this model to third party companies, just like Amazon and Microsoft have done.
Hiroshi Mikitani said, “So we can easily teach them (to do business), package it, and give them a platform where they can fully use it for their own business.”
The CEO added that Rakuten will “launch something within a few months.”
In terms of artificial intelligence predictive models, Japanese companies lag behind their American and Chinese counterparts to some extent. But they're trying to catch up quickly.
Japanese telecom giant NTT announced this month that its proprietary LLM will be launched in March next year. SoftBank's telecommunications division announced last month that its generative artificial intelligence computing platform has been put into operation.