I've been doing a bit of research on what SoftBank is up to in regards to it's AI ambitions and have discovered that on 4 August 2023 SoftBank announced it had launched a new company to research and develop homegrown Large Language Models (LLM) specialized for the Japanese language. The company is called SB Intuitions and it will also develop, market and provide generative AI services.
Hironobu Tamba will lead the new business, SB Intuitions. He was a long time Softbank employee who has most recently been running the company’s AI and IoT division. Whilst he was at SoftBank, Hironobu was involved in the collaboration in 2017 between SoftBank and a company called Inuitive. Below is an excerpt from the collaboration announcement.
Inuitive is an Israeli fabless semiconductor company that develops advanced vision processors for edge devices, notably the NU4100 vision-on-chip processor is the third generation of Inuitive's vision processors series and is ideal for robotics, drones, VR, and edge-AI applications that demand multiple sensor aggregation, processing, packing, and streaming. It is specifically designed for XR headsets, robots and other applications that sense and analyze the environment using six, eight or more cameras, as they make real-time actionable decisions based on that input.
Interestingly enough, around 7 months ago, our SBD in Israel, Mauro Daimant "reached out" to Dor Zepenuik and Yaron Rashi in relation to Brainchip's 2nd Gen Blog. Dor Zepenuik is Founder and CTO of Inuitive and Yaaron Rashi is System on Chip Architect/Engineer at Inuitve.
BTW, I don't have any idea how long SoftBank continued with its collaboration with Inuitive, maybe it's still ongoing today, but obviously Hironobu Tamba is aware of Inuitive, having worked with the company previously.
Hironobu Tamba, whilst he was at SoftBank wrote this Case Study on Vantiq, which is all about making the Port City of Takeshiba, Tokyo the smartest city in the world. As you can see, he is very interested in edge computing.
Make of all of this what you will, but for me, I think it's very clear that, as recent reports have suggested, SoftBank is intent on capitalising on the AI wave and there does seem to be a focus on edge computing, smart cities, automation,, etc basically all areas in which our technology would be a perfect fit.
SoftBank launches SB Intuitions
SoftBank Corp.‘s corporate page provides information about “SoftBank Corp. Launches New Company to Develop Homegrown Large Language Models (LLM)”.
www.softbank.jp
SoftBank and Inuitive Collaboration
Inuitive Ltd. (Inuitive) and SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank), a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp.
www.inuitive-tech.com
Linkedin Maruo Diamont
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Case Study Vantiq