Japan’s Fintech-to-e-commerce giant, Rakuten plans to launch its own AI (artificial intelligence) language model within the next two months, as per CEO Hiroshi “Mickey” on Monday. Rakuten has a number of businesses from banking to e-commerce and telecommunications, therefore has a large amount of “very unique” data to train its large language model (LLM) on, according to Rakuten’s CEO Mikitani.
Rakuten plans to use the AI model internally at the company to improve operational efficiency before opening it up to businesses. The venture into the generative AI platform will be add to Rakuten’s growth.
Rakuten venturing into generative AI platform
It comes as the fintech-to-e-commerce giant looks to join other technology firms developing the rapidly growing generative AI technology.
Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani, Rakuten’s CEO said the company is working on its own large language model, or LLM. These are huge algorithms trained on massive data sets that underpin AI applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Rakuten’s large database
Rakuten has a number of businesses from banking to e-commerce and telecommunications, therefore has a large amount of “very unique” data to train its LLM on, according to Rakuten’s CEO.
“Nobody has a dataset like we do,” he added.
Rakuten plans to use the AI model internally to improve operational efficiency and marketing by 20%, Mikitani said.
He also wants to offer the model to third-party businesses to build on, much like Amazon or Microsoft do.
“So we can easily teach them [businesses], package it and provide the platform for them to completely they can use it for their business,” Mikitani said.
The CEO added that Rakuten is going to “have something within a couple of months.”
More tech giants launching LLMs
To date, major U.S. and Chinese technology giants have been launching their own large language models.
OpenAI, Amazon and Google are among the most notable in the U.S. In China, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have launched their own models too.
Japanese firms have fallen somewhat behind their U.S. and Chinese counterparts. But they are trying to quickly catch up.
Telecommunications group NTT announced this month that its proprietary LLM will be available in March.
The telecommunications arm of SoftBank announced in November that its generative AI computing platform is operational.
Japanese firms have a chance to create LLMs specific to the Japanese language, potentially giving them an edge over their U.S. and Chinese rivals.
Mikitani said the push into AI is going to give Rakuten “huge profitable growth.”
Why large language model matters?
AI technology is increasingly becoming a core aspect in the business strategies of most tech companies, as observed during the latest earnings season which saw a record mention of AI in management speeches. Rakuten’s entry into the AI space comes as the EU is moving closer to regulating AI technologies, showing the growing significance of AI in the global tech scene. Rakuten unique dataset from its various businesses could provide it with a competitive edge in this rapidly growing field of AI.
