Tech Japan builds its own ChatGPT

[thomas]

To better cope with the intricacies of the Japanese language and culture, the Japanese government and technology firms such as NEC, Fujitsu and SoftBank are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on creating AI systems that are based on the same underlying technology, known as large language models (LLMs), but that use the Japanese language, rather than translations of the English version.

LLMs typically use huge amounts of data from publicly available sources to learn the patterns of natural speech and prose. They are trained to predict the next word on the basis of previous words in a piece of text. The vast majority of the text that ChatGPT's previous model, GPT-3, was trained on was in English. [...] In Japan, there's a concern that AI systems trained on data sets in other languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japan's language and culture. The structure of sentences in Japanese is completely different from English. ChatGPT must therefore translate a Japanese query into English, find the answer and then translate the response back into Japanese. Whereas English has just 26 letters, written Japanese consists of two sets of 48 basic characters, plus 2,136 regularly used Chinese characters, or kanji. Most kanji have two or more pronunciations, and a further 50,000 or so rarely used kanji exist. Given that complexity, it is not surprising that ChatGPT can stumble with the language. In Japanese, ChatGPT "sometimes generates extremely rare characters that most people have never seen before, and weird unknown words result", says Sakaguchi.

It's about more than just language:

For an LLM to be useful and even commercially viable, it needs to accurately reflect cultural practices as well as language. If ChatGPT is prompted to write a job-application e-mail in Japanese, for instance, it might omit standard expressions of politeness, and look like an obvious translation from English.

Why Japan is building its own version of ChatGPT

Some Japanese researchers feel that AI systems trained on foreign languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japanese language and culture.

www.nature.com

Why Japan Is Building Its Own Version of ChatGPT

Some Japanese researchers feel that AI systems trained on foreign languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japanese language and culture

www.scientificamerican.com

 

[johnnyG]

Will pass this on to my wife, and daughters (both kind of tech-y, and who happen to be here right now).