As we grow our operations internationally, we’re expanding into Asia with a new office in Tokyo, Japan. We are committed to collaborating with the Japanese government, local businesses, and research institutions to develop safe AI tools that serve Japan’s unique needs and to unlock new opportunities. We chose Tokyo as our first Asian office for its global leadership in technology, culture of service, and a community that embraces innovation.
“We’re excited to be in Japan which has a rich history of people and technology coming together to do more. We believe AI will accelerate work by empowering people to be more creative and productive, while also delivering broad value to current and new industries that have yet to be imagined.” – Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
To spearhead our efforts in Japan and ensure we are deeply integrated within the local community, we welcome Tadao Nagasaki as our new President of OpenAI Japan. Mr. Nagasaki will lead our commercial and market engagement efforts and help build our local team that will advance Global Affairs, Go-to-Market, Communications, Operations and other functions in serving Japan.
As a first step in our long-term commitment to the region, we’re providing local businesses with early access to a GPT-4 custom model specifically optimized for the Japanese language. This custom model offers improved performance in translating and summarizing Japanese text, is cost effective, and operates up to 3x faster than its predecessor. Speak, a top English learning app in Japan, is seeing 2.8x faster tutor explanations in Japanese when users make a mistake with a 47% reduction in token cost, unlocking higher quality tutor feedback in more places and with higher limits per user. We plan to release the custom model more broadly in the API in the coming months.
