Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new philosopher’s stone to achieve world economic hegemony. Donald Trump was surrounded by large magnates of technology companies during his inauguration in Washington. Days after the launch of the new US administration, sowing doubt on the market about whether Silicon Valley’s huge investments to develop AI are not actually inflated. In this polarized world among the great superpowers, what role does Japan play, a country that decades ago was synonym for technological avant -garde?
The answer can be in corporate agreements such as the one announced recently. To offer AI services to corporate clients in Japan, it reinforces the ties of Japanese technology with the United States and gives the Asian country an impulse considered by many vital experts given its lagging position in the intelligent computing career.
The CEOs of the two companies, Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman, announced on February 3 in Tokyo that the new company will be called SB OpenAi Japan. Its AI service, designed to expedite commercial operations, will be called intelligence crystal. It will be owned by OpenAI and a new company established by and its telecommunications subsidiary. The annual investment will be 3,000 million dollars.
They are, that in 2008 he introduced the and revolutionized the sophisticated one, and until then considered impenetrable, Japanese mobile telephony industry, has promised 15,000 million dollars for Stargate, the joint company of SoftBank with Openai and Oracle that will develop artificial intelligence in the United States .
The announcement of the New Alliance between the two IA giants took place four days before the meeting last Friday between Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ihiba and Trump in Washington. One of the central points of the bilateral agenda was the robust investment made by Japanese companies in the United States and the creation of jobs, according to Japanese public television NHK.
Softbank thus becomes a key actor in the new geopolitical order in which technology is increasingly relevant. Its new alliance with OpenAI, which will initially serve companies from the SoftBank group, opens the door for synergies considered key if you take into account Japan’s delayed position in digital transformation.
According to SoftBank, intelligence crystal will automate daily tasks – such as generating financial reports, writing documents and managing the consultations that customers can make – to allow professionals to concentrate on creativity and strategic decision making.
By offering optimized AI tools for the processing of the Japanese language, it is expected that it benefits economic sectors that have difficulty integrating AI due to linguistic and regulatory barriers, such as financial and manufacturing.
The consensus of the studies specialized in digitalization and the use of AI in the world highlights the disparity between the solid Japanese infrastructure and its extreme caution when adopting new technologies. In 2010, Japan gave its position as the first economy of Asia. In the use of AI, Japan occupies the ninth world ranking, according to a study of the Human Centered Artificial Intelligence Center (HAI), from Stanford University. The most recent edition of this study, published in 2024, evaluates the ecosystem of the AI of 36 countries, using 42 indicators, including private investment, research articles, patents, official support, legislation and the production of programs in English in English .
Other studies in which Japan appears lagging as an IA user cite cultural factors such as risk aversion and priority of consensus on rapid decision making. The most optimistic of recent studies on Japanese technology was published by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and highlights its “ethical rigor, as an important asset in sectors where security and trust are critical, such as health and systems autonomous. ”
Taking advantage of its infrastructure and, Japan has given rise to a unique robots niche for corporate uses, capable of learning from interactions with the environment, adapting to unexpected situations and making decisions. The also called “social robots” make intensive use of the incorporated AI (EMBODIED AI), considered the following border of robotics in their relationship with the human being.
The role of robotics
For engineers such as Jad Tarifi, founder of the first generative team of Google and president of Integral AI, a company with offices in Tokyo, the robotics industry is key to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) . In a recent interview with the Podcast specialized in Information Technology Japan, Tarifi explained the advantage of robots to generate their own training data through “active learning” and put them to the collection of data from models based on the language of the language of the Current.
The Japanese government has launched several support programs to the technological sector, including the so -called Society 5.0, which seeks to “overcome chronic social challenges, such as population aging, social polarization, depopulation, and restrictions related to energy and energy the environment ”.
The investment objective of the Japanese Executive in R&D research is between 2021 and 2026 in about 746,000 million euros, funds that would come from the public and private sectors.
To ensure its semiconductor supply, Japan subsidizes the Taiwan manufacturer Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing (TSMC), which has a logical chip factory in southern Japan, and this year will build a second floor. According to the local news agency Kyodo, Japan will offer about 6,000 million euros to TSMC, its main chip supplier, to ensure production in Japanese territory, given the geopolitical risk derived from the growing tensions between the United States and China on the island whose island Sovereignty is not recognized by Beijing.
