Financial News Agency, December 11 (Editor Zhou Ziyi) The CEO of Japan's Rakuten Group said in a recent interview that the company plans to launch its own artificial intelligence (AI) language model within the next two months.

Currently, the Japanese giant, which covers various business fields, is seeking to join the ranks of other technology companies around the world to develop this rapidly growing technology.

The path of AI expansion

Lotte Group CEO Hiroshi Mikitani (Hiroshi Mikitani) said the company is developing its own large-scale language model. Large-scale language models support artificial intelligence applications by training huge algorithms on massive data sets.

Rakuten has many businesses such as commercial banking, e-commerce, and telecommunications, so it has a large amount of “very unique” data that can be used to train large-scale language models.

Hiroshi Mikitani said, “No one has a data set like ours.”

In addition, Miki also revealed that the company plans to first use its artificial intelligence model internally to increase operational efficiency and marketing efficiency by 20%; later, he also hopes to provide this model to third party companies, like US tech giants Amazon or Microsoft.

Hiroshi Mikitani believes that initiatives to promote artificial intelligence will bring “huge profit growth” to Lotte. He also added that Rakuten will “launch some products within the next few months.”

So far, major US and Chinese tech giants have launched their own large-scale language models. Some of the most notable companies in the US include OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. In China, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have also launched their own models.

To some extent, Japanese companies lag behind their American and Chinese counterparts. But they're trying to catch up quickly.

It is worth mentioning that Japanese companies have the opportunity to create language models specifically for Japanese, which may give them an advantage among Japanese companies.