Japanese technology giant Rakuten plans to launch its own language model of artificial intelligence, the CEO said in an interview with CNBC.
Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani revealed that the company is working on its Large Language Model (LLM). He added that Rakuten develops a range of businesses, from banking to e-commerce and telecommunications, so it has a large amount of “very unique” data to teach its LLM.
According to Mikitani, Rakuten plans to use the AI model internally to improve operational efficiency and marketing by 20%. He also wants to offer this model to third-party companies for further development.
Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani added that Rakuten “will have something within a few months.”
A Rakuten representative later clarified that it was not talking about the timing of the launch, but instead that there could be an announcement of a major language model, possibly in the next few months.
These days, the big tech giants of the US and China are launching their big language models. OpenAI, Amazon and Google are among the most famous in the US. In China, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have also launched their own models.
Japanese companies lag somewhat behind their American and Chinese counterparts. But they are trying to quickly make up for lost time. Telecoms group NTT announced this month that its own LLM system will be available in March. Now Rakuten has announced its plans.
Source: cnbc
