2024/07/18 | Written by: Sungmin Park

The impact of generative AI in Japan

What are your thoughts on the economic impact of generative AI? According to the paper on “An early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models”, mentioned that nearly 80% of U.S. jobs could have at least 10% of their tasks completed twice as fast without any quality loss, via the use of generative AI. This great power of AI brings the countries, including Japan, to engage in industries to avoid falling behind in the competition of development race.

Japan is actively promoting the industrial use of generative AI technology lately. While the current pace of advancement presents a wealth of untapped potential, it also offers exciting opportunities for innovation and rapid development. Big tech players have also joined in generative AI scene to boost Japan’s standing. Small businesses in Japan are also exploring how they can leverage large language models(LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) into their business.

Upstage’s powerful, purpose-trained Solar LLM recently expanded its language support to Japanese, introducing the Solar Mini Chat ja model. Back in May, we had the amazing chance to connect with Japanese enterprises and developers, introducing them to our LLM. Want to know more about our adventures? Check out this event recap of our time in Japan!

Solar Mini Chat ja was highly anticipated
by Japan’s enterprises and developers!

Upstage has recently had the opportunity to engage with hundreds of people in Japan who have shown interest in our Solar LLM. We've built great connections in the market through a big event, a couple of meetups, and by joining in on the Nextech Week Tokyo expo. Together with AWS, we hosted an amazing event that connected us with Japanese enterprises and System Integrator (SI) partners. During the event, we introduced our Solar LLM and discussed our LLM ecosystem from a real-world perspective.

We also hosted two developer meetups in Japan, where we had the pleasure of meeting Korean developers working in Japan, as well as global developers who participated in the "Applied ML: LLMs and Knowledge Graphs" session at the Tokyo AI Talks. These events allowed us to discuss the present and future of LLMs and share our knowledge and expertise in the field.

One of the most memorable thing was receive such valuable feedback on our products from developers and enterprises. It was even more surprising to discover that developers had already started using Solar LLM before we advanced into market! This has far beyond our expectations. There's clearly a high demand in Japan's AI industry for a model that excels in Japanese. That's why our Solar Mini Chat ja, which expands its language support into Japanese, has been gaining significant attention at the meetups.

Most attendees were interested in the real-world use case that contributed to the development of a new product with Document AI. They were also impressed with how our model's features enhance support for Japanese, surpassing other major language models, and they loved that it offers an on-premise option for securely handling private data.

Solar LLM fuels APAC expansion
with its outstanding technical capabilities

Through our experiences at this event in Japan, we were able to identify the strength and potential for our products and technology in the Japanese market.

The capabilities of Solar Mini Chat ja are particularly valuable in scenarios where a nuanced understanding and responsive execution of complex conversational exchanges in Japanese is required. This model excels at fine-tuning as it has been pre-trained to enhance performance for particular tasks, making it highly adaptable to various scenarios.

[ → Learn more about Solar Mini Chat ja]

Upstage's Solar LLM has expanded its language support into the APAC region by unveiling the 'Solar Mini Chat JA,' which supports Japanese, and plans to further empower its multilingual support by including languages such as Thai. This further expansion into the APAC region demonstrates our commitment to leading the way in generative AI technology. Stay tuned for more updates on Solar, as we aim to make a significant impact across Korea, the US, and beyond. We look forward to embrace the future of AI with our LLM!