OpenAI opens new office in Tokyo, appoints former Amazon employee to lead AI initiative.

OpenAI has been actively working to advance artificial intelligence in recent months, facing competition from global tech giants like Microsoft and Google. To strengthen its efforts, the organization has appointed the former president of Amazon Web Services’s Japan division to lead its initiative to attract enterprise clients in the fourth-largest economy worldwide, as reported by Bloomberg.

OpenAI opens an office in Japan

OpenAI has announced that it will open an office in Tokyo as it releases a custom GPT-4 model that caters to Japanese language users. It said it has 2 million weekly active users in the country, while its corporate customers include Daikin Industries Ltd., Rakuten Group Inc. and a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corp.

“We want to build a record of frequent dialogue with Japanese companies,” said Tadao Nagasaki, the newly appointed president of OpenAI Japan, at a press conference on Monday, according to a Bloomberg report. The Tokyo office will be the company’s third overseas outpost, after opening its doors in London and recently in Dublin. According to Nagasaki, the Tokyo outpost will grow to around 10-20 employees this year.

The startup is banking on the growing demand for the business version of ChatGPT, even as it faces more competitors offering similarthings products for the workplace. It launched a business version of ChatGPT in August, adding privacy protections including data encryption and a promise that it won’t use customer data to develop its technology.

More than 600,000 people have signed up to use ChatGPT Enterprise, up from about 150,000 in January. But competition for business customers is growing daily from companies like Anthropic and Cohere, as well as its own investor Microsoft Corp.

Japan has begun to draw global attention to its potential as an artificial intelligence market as Tokyo funnels billions of dollars into the technology’s supply chain. Microsoft is investing $2.9 billion over the next two years to build the country’s data centers and cloud computing infrastructure, while two former Google researchers have set up shop in Tokyo for their $200 million startup, Sakana AI. Microsoft is also partnering with SoftBank Corp. on generative AI, while OpenAI is working with Rakuten on local AI services.

“Our enthusiasm for Japan is partly due to the country’s leadership in technology,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said.

(Courtesy of Bloomberg)