The computer they're using is pretty quick.*
From the journal Nature, September 14:
Some Japanese researchers feel that AI systems trained on foreign languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japanese language and culture.
....MUCH MOREJapan is building its own versions of ChatGPT — the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot made by US firm OpenAI that became a worldwide sensation after it was unveiled just under a year ago.
The Japanese government and big technology firms such as NEC, Fujitsu and SoftBank are sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into 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.
“Current public LLMs, such as GPT, excel in English, but often fall short in Japanese due to differences in the alphabet system, limited data and other factors,” says Keisuke Sakaguchi, a researcher at Tohoku University in Japan who specializes in natural language processing.
English bias
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.ChatGPT’s eerie ability to hold human-like conversations, has both delighted and concerned researchers. Some see it as a potential labour-saving tool; others worry that it could be used fabricate scientific papers or data.
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....
*Previous mentions of the Fugako supercomputer, at one time the fastest in the world and currently ranked #2:
I Have Dishobnored My Ancestors.... (Japan Dominates The World's Top Supercomputers) NVDA
....ZeroHedge beat me to the latest Top 500 Supercomputer list.
The New Top500 List Of The World's Fastest Supercomputers Is Out (AMD; NVDA)
Supercomputers: Oak Ridge National Lab Still Has The World's Fastest, Followed By Japan and Finland (but what about China?)
And on language, August 13:
"ChatGPT Is Cutting Non-English Languages Out of the AI Revolution"
