- By quade
- 19 September 2023
Japan Establishes Their Own ChatGPT-Like AI
Many people know Japan for its advanced cities and robots. It’s not surprising that they use smart computer programs. For instance, some government offices in Japan use ChatGPT to help with paperwork. However, they found that the computer program couldn’t understand Japanese very well. So they decided to create a better version.
This topic is worth looking into because it’s about how culture and modern technology come together. In the future, your country will probably customize ChatGPT and similar tools to match the preferences and beliefs of your people. Japan has been doing a great job combining modern technology and old traditions for a long time, which could serve as an example for other countries.
Why Japan Decided to Re-create ChatGPT For Themselves?
The Japanese language, Nihongo, is very different from English. A researcher named Keisuke Sakaguchi from Tohoku University says that the current version of ChatGPT can only change Japanese into English.
“Current public LLMs, such as GPT, excel in English, but often fall short in Japanese due to differences in the alphabet system, limited data, and other factors.”
Keisuke Sakaguchi, Tohoku University researcher
The people who made ChatGPT are from the United States, where English is mostly spoken. So, it makes sense that they made big models for English.
But that makes it harder for countries like Japan, where most people don’t speak English. Nihongo is considered to be more complex than English.
English uses only 26 letters. On the other hand, Nihongo (Japanese) uses three types of characters: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are like English, where you put their characters together to form words.
Therefore, Kanji is made up of many Chinese characters that can sometimes mean the same thing. Nature also mentions that it has 50,000 that most people don’t use now.
“Sometimes generates extremely rare characters that most people have never seen before, and weird unknown words result.”
Sakaguchi Keisuke says to ChatGPT
Most computer programs that learn use English rules for changing words into Japanese. They usually don’t pay attention to the different ways of speaking politely or casually, which are very important in Japanese culture. This can make it uncomfortable for Japanese people to read what Japan ChatGPT says.
How is Japan revolutionizing chatbots to achieve superior performance.
Scientists made a special system called Rakuda to rank the Japan ChatGPT model. Sam Passaglia, who helped start it, and his team told ChatGPT to check if the answers were culturally appropriate and smooth for regular questions.
“Certainly, Japanese LLMs are getting much better, but they are far behind GPT-4. This is not technically insurmountable but just a question of resources.”
Sam Passaglia, University of Tokyo researcher
That’s why some Japanese government offices and universities want to use a very fast computer called Fugaku. This computer can make it much quicker to train this new big language model.
However, Japan might build a better computer than the Fugaku LLM. Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology is giving money for a smart computer program used in science.
“We hope to dramatically accelerate the scientific research cycle and expand the search space.”
Makoto Taiji, Deputy Director at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research
“If a Japanese version of ChatGPT can be made accurate, it is expected to bring better results for people who want to learn Japanese or conduct research on Japan.”
Shotaro Kinoshita, Keio University School of Medicine Researcher
