TL;DR
The United States and China dominate AI due to vast data resources, global linguistic reach, and massive R&D investment. Japan’s AI usage is only 26.7%, compared to 69% in the U.S. and 81% in China.
Japanese companies are focusing AI usage on cost-cutting rather than innovation. With limited language data, weak funding, and low adoption, Japan ranks in the Stanford University AI Vibrancy ranking. Its digital trade deficit could balloon to ¥45 trillion by 2035.
by MagazineKey4532
22 comments
Yes? Young people can barely use computers as it is. Big corpos and old Showa men killed Japan’s young IT whiz kids in the 1990s and 2000s by prosecuting them with rigid copyright laws and bending over to American pressure. Not to mention the role of mass media in portraying anything to do with computers as ‘otaku’ or as being detrimental to society. This is a product of Japan’s own making.
Have to say that Japanese company I’ve seen is using AI to generate spams messages, presentation, and videos. It may seems like creating spams using AI reduces cost but it’s actually wasting time and money to the company. I usually just delete them.
One innovative way I’ve found it to use AI to summarize meeting minutes and presentations. An hour meeting or a presentation can be summarized into few items in a to-do list. Thinking of using AI to create a virtual me to attend online meetings and presentations to further use my time more effectively.
Yes.
There aren’t many companies in Japan able to come up with their own systems.
However, a lot of companies are good at piggybacking on trends AND technologies, and in their own way able to create AI-based products.
Not any good products, by any comparison, but products nonetheless, for which those companies are also able to find fools to sell them to.
You guys are reading way too fucking into this (doesn’t mean it isn’t correct though).
But I’d argue its a WAY simpler explanation for this…
Its easier to develop a large **LANGUAGE** model when you have more than one Billion people using it (English and Chinese only make the cut, with Indi and Spanish with half the amount waaaay behind).
I’ve seen some statistics a while ago.
I think it was about the worlds biggest 100 IT companies and the only one in it was Rakuten. But they’re only in it because they have so much business in Japan, they failed basically everywhere else in the world.
And that’s why, of course, Japan is behind when it comes to AI. They haven’t even caught up to the rest of the world when it comes to regular IT topics.
We’ll see. They structured the copyright law to make ingestion “free.” At some point the big US AI companies are going to have to pay a ton of money to copyright holders.
Probably because
– adoption of deep AI (or agentic AI) is difficult in a country with a risk averse culture with an historical predominance of human capital and manual processes.
– no early stage funding scene to fuel innovation and small companies needed to create transition. Literally none.
As good as jp had been at making hardware for the past 50 years, software is dead 💀. Maybe lithography making a comeback though
Despite repeated claims of AI boosting productivity and yadda yadda, nothing of value has come out of it in years. Maybe this is not a bad thing?
There is a much lower acceptance of failure (mistakes) in Japan compared with the West. Currently the generative AI still hallucinates too much, its answers often requiring a lot of manual tuning and fact checking. The current AI is just not well-suited to the culture of risk aversion and perfectionism.
Almost everything software related is doomed here. Entertainment related software is about the only exception. Computer science in general seems to be looked down upon, with Japan prioritizing hardware. The dumb thing is that it also lost at hardware in a ton of industries, so when whatever little is left there is gone it will be truly screwed in the technology department.
Has for years. Read and 2023 and 2024 Stanford report on AI. (Is 2025 out yet)
Japan is so far behind it’s not even funny.
I’ve written about this in a few academic papers. In a way it’s good for some sectors like education. It’s giving them time to catch and see the positives and negatives in other countries. It’s hopefully giving the youth time to see how AI will change industries.
But yeah. I have given survies to students 3 years running now gauging AI usage and perspectives. It’s fucking sad, 3 years running that the computer science and art student especially still overwhelming indicate they don’t think AI will effects their future careers.
We like to blame it on culture, but in all honesty, Japan is behind because it has the OLDEST population in the world. If you’ve ever helped your parents with fixing their phone/laptop, you’ve basically delt with the average employee in a Japanese company…
Japan is just smarter than the rest of the world in this matter. There is no ROI on AI.
Can’t drop out of a race that you were never competing in.
Yes absolutely, the institutions also know it and their only plan is to align as close as possible with friendly winners, maybe focusing on hardware manufacturing. But the software race is not fought to any degree locally
They saw that it’s just a huge bubble which soon will burst.
Ai was never their thing
Is the robot Iam worried about like wtf ur were like the most ahead
you make the first robot that can climb up and down stair in early 2000s and now ur giving up and letting tsla and Boston dynamic take the lead wtf
What happen your lead Honda ? Toyota ? Sony ???
Good! AI has been a disaster across many creative industries.
And the car race, China going to suck them clean. Japan far too slow or non existent on the EV front. Some hybrids but that abut it,
Sakana is a Tokyo based frontier lab and staying quite quiet at the moment. But, every tech event I go to in Tokyo these days is sponsored by them, and I am familiar enough with their research to be cautiously optimistic about what they are up to.
Let’s not pretend Japan ever had a chance LOL.
The salary men are to busy paying their respects to their bosses and getting blind after work or cheating on their wives. Got no time to produce kids or lead a bleeding edge area of technology 😂
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