What a Japanese AI unicorn can teach Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley’s "move fast and break things” mantra propelled tech innovation for the internet age. In the era of artificial intelligence, it should take a leaf out of Japan’s playbook and slow down.

A rush to deploy AI tools to the public has resulted in embarrassing blunders, from an AI-powered Google search feature recently recommending glue on pizza, to consequences that can impact real people’s livelihoods — like the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT showing signs of racial bias when ranking job applicants, as a Bloomberg analysis found.

It has also led to tech companies consuming enormous amounts of energy to power AI. The International Energy Agency estimates the total electricity consumption for data centers across the globe will be roughly equivalent to the power demand of Japan in 2026. Other forecasters say that by 2030, these centers are on course to use more energy than India, the world’s most populous country. Large language models (LLMs), the technology underpinning the latest crop of generative AI tools, require gargantuan troves of data and training them takes immense amounts of computing power and energy.

As the tech continues to develop, many AI firms think the key to growth is to make LLMs even larger. Some American tech titans including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are even backing nuclear energy firms to help power AI data centers. But there are other options beyond rushing to fire up new reactors.

Tokyo-based startup Sakana AI — which Nikkei Asia reported on June 15 will become the fastest-ever Japanese company to achieve unicorn status — has taken a different approach. When it comes to the most consequential technology of our time, it is playing the long game.

Sakana AI, whose name means "fish" in Japanese, was created last year by David Ha, Ren Ito and Llion Jones with the goal of applying nature-inspired ideas such as evolution and collective intelligence to create AI models, and not gobbling up as much energy as possible to train a single model. Notably, while at Google, Jones coauthored the seminal 2017 research paper that underpins the technology of today’s most popular AI products, including ChatGPT, and spurred much of the current boom.

Ha told me that many of the issues facing AI stem from companies prematurely deploying the technology in search of short-term profits while disregarding the high energy toll. Sakana AI’s technology could already be used to create a virtual girlfriend chatbot, but they are more focused on researching ways to apply artificial intelligence to solve real-world issues. This is in line with other Japan-based AI companies the West may have never heard of, such as Preferred Networks, which is trying to develop more energy-efficient AI chips.

Silicon Valley needs to start playing the long game, too. The world does not need more useless chatbots that generate bad poetry or perpetuate racist biases at scale while consuming unsustainable swaths of resources. This way of thinking could have also spared some of the embarrassing headlines that have turned much of the public against embracing AI for good.

Sakana AI’s most recent research is looking at new ways of producing models that do not require extensive amounts of energy and it has longer-term ambitions of helping Japan come up with real solutions to some of its most pressing issues, including a looming labor crunch. Their mission has received support from the Japanese government.

In Japan, depopulation and a shrinking workforce have led to a public and private sector ecosystem that seeks to embrace the emerging technology’s possibilities with curiosity and hope instead of despair. There is a sense of urgency around the idea that these tools can help solve labor shortages — with less of the existential fears that they will end up replacing human workers.

Microsoft Japan President Miki Tsusaka touted generative AI’s power to accelerate growth in a nation with an aging population in a recent interview. Her comments come on the heels of Microsoft announcing it will spend some $2.9 billion, its biggest-ever investment in Japan, to increase cloud computing and AI infrastructure.

Being a close ally to the United States has also helped Japan in the current boom — the country has welcomed a spate of U.S. tech investment that may have previously been funneled to China. Along with Microsoft, OpenAI opened its first Asia office in Tokyo this spring, while Oracle pledged to put more than $8 billion over the next 10 years into cloud computing and AI.

Risk-averse Japan lost its place as a global tech leader during the past few decades, but the AI boom, still in its infancy, is a different beast. This time around, Tokyo's cautious and collective approach to the technology means it is uniquely positioned to come out ahead when it comes to getting artificial intelligence right. The rest of the world may soon find itself playing catch-up.