The logo of Japanese technology giant Rakuten, seen at the Mobile World Congress 2019.
Paco Freire| SOPA images | LightRocket via Getty Images
Japanese Rakuten plans to launch its own artificial intelligence language model within the next two months, its CEO told CNBC in an interview that aired Monday.
It comes as the fintech-to-e-commerce giant looks to join other tech companies developing the fast-growing technology.
Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani said the company is working on its own major language model, or LLM. These are massive algorithms trained on massive data sets that underpin artificial intelligence applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Rakuten has a number of businesses ranging from banking to e-commerce and telecommunications, and therefore has a large amount of “very unique” data on which to train its LLM, according to Mikitani.
“Nobody has a data set like us,” he added.
The company plans to use the AI model internally to improve operational efficiency and marketing by 20%, Mikitani said.
He also wants to offer the model to external companies to build on Amazon or Microsoft Doing.
“So we can teach them easily [businesses]package it and provide them the platform so they can fully use it for their business,” Mikitani said.
The CEO added that Rakuten “will have something in a few months.”
So far, major US and Chinese tech giants have launched their own major language models.
OpenAI, Amazon and Googling are among the most notable in the US. In China, Baidu, Ali Baba And Tencent have also launched their own models.
Japanese companies have fallen somewhat behind their American and Chinese counterparts. But they try to catch up quickly.
Telecommunications group NTT announced this month that its own LLM will be available in March.
SoftBank’s telecommunications arm announced in November that its generative AI computing platform is operational.
Japanese companies have the opportunity to create LLMs specific to the Japanese language, potentially giving them an edge over their American and Chinese rivals.
Mikitani said the move to AI will deliver “tremendous profitable growth” to Rakuten.