New hub will be OpenAI first office in Asia and fourth globally
OpenAI is expanding to Japan, with the opening of a new Tokyo office and plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language.
The move is significant for a few reasons. It underscores the opportunity the company sees to court business in the country, and highlights how OpenAI will likely need to localize its technology on different languages as it expands. And, more pragmatically, as the pros and cons of AI come into sharper focus for governments, their regulators and overall public discourse, having feet on the ground becomes important for OpenAI to understand and influence those currents in its favor.
OpenAI comes with giant name recognition, but won’t be without competitors. SoftBank is also hoping to build and capitalize on the current enterprise vogue for AI with last November’s launch of SB Intuitions, which aims to build large language models (LLMs) and generative AI services natively in Japanese.