National computing power is less than 1/10 of chatgpt, Japan is very nervous.
Japan's current computing power is 0.8 exaflops, which is less than one-tenth of what OpenAI obtained when creating the OpenAI chatbot.
Japanese Prime Minister's AI Special Advisor, Hideki Murai, stated that in order for Japan to become a global leader in the field of AI, it needs to rapidly improve its computing capabilities.
On Tuesday, Hideki Murai, in an interview with Reuters, stated that the government's top priority is computing power, and they have a sense of crisis regarding this issue. "We hope to lay the foundation for the AI era."
Japan lags behind the United States in terms of artificial intelligence computer infrastructure. The country has about 3,000 companies that can access the supercomputer at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), which has a computing power of 0.8 exaflops.
According to the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, this is less than one-tenth of the computing power that OpenAI, supported by Microsoft, achieved when creating the ChatGPT chatbot.
Exaflop is a unit used to measure the performance of supercomputers, indicating that the computer can perform at least 10^18 or one hundred quintillion floating-point operations per second. The prefix "exa-" in exaflop represents "one hundred quintillion," which means 10 billion multiplied by 10 billion or 1 followed by 18 zeros.
Murai said that Japan plans to increase AIST's computing power to 2.8 hundred quintillion operations per second by the end of 2024 and provide subsidies to companies such as Sakura Internet and SoftBank to build supercomputers. The government can also provide data for training artificial intelligence, but it will be reserved for AI models that can drive innovation.
Murai compared this strategy to Japan's approach in nurturing Shohei Ohtani, a superstar in Major League Baseball. He said:
"Ten years ago, people scoffed at the idea of players like Ohtani entering the Major League Baseball in the United States. That's why we are working hard to create an environment where similar individuals can emerge in the field of artificial intelligence."