The Japanese government has decided to provide 387.3 billion yen (approximately 3.7 trillion won) this year to support the development of sovereign AI, a project being pursued by a coalition of the country's leading companies.
Ryosei Akazawa, Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, announced at a press conference following a cabinet meeting today (June 30) that Noetra, established by SoftBank and others with the goal of developing Japan's own AI, has been selected as the recipient of funding for a public project by a national research and development agency.
Starting with this year's financial injection, the Japanese government plans to provide a total of 1 trillion yen (approximately 9.5 trillion won) over the next five years.
This decision by the Japanese government stems from a sense of crisis that the country has fallen behind the United States and China in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Consequently, Japan has set a strategy to gain an edge in "Physical AI," an AI field that interacts with the real world, by leveraging its vast manufacturing data, which is considered one of the country's strengths.
More than 30 major Japanese corporations and manufacturers, including SoftBank, NEC, Honda, Sony Group, Fujitsu, and Asahi Kasei, have participated as investors in this project.
These companies are seeking ways to apply the developed AI directly to industrial sites.
The model is set to be developed with 1 trillion parameters by next year, and will be upgraded into a multimodal model capable of processing images and audio by 2029.
Furthermore, by the early 2030s, the plan is to advance it into a model capable of comprehensively handling physical information from the real world, such as weight, temperature, location, and distance.
Minister Akazawa emphasized that Japan's strength lies in its ability to utilize vast data accumulated in areas such as elderly healthcare, disaster response, manufacturing, and the decommissioning work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, stating, "We will build a foundation for Physical AI and robots that can leverage these strengths."
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