Tokyo AI (TAI)

SAL (Smart Agri Labs) is a TAI community startup, check them out!

The second speaker for the Applied ML and AI session is Michael Makarov, who used to be based in Japan a while back, before moving to SF for a dozen years, working with the likes of Google, Twitter, and Pinecone. Michael will talk about how to select a vector database for your specific needs. With a lot of choices out there, and knowing that he's also a stand-up comedian, this will be fun! When: 29 October, 7pm - 9:30pm Where: Tokyo, Minato Organizer(s): Michael Makarov Sponsor(s): Code Chrysalis and Pinecone Event page: https://lu.ma/mpq7niip

During the launch of the AI Salon Taiwan, I flew to Taipei to support Chi Ko and Kuan-Yu Hou in their chapter launch, to start building support for our Taipei-Tokyo AI bridge. I really enjoyed the chat with Chih-Han Yu (CH) and Cathy H. (CH), moderated by Jon Y. (Asianometry). Great perspective from the founder of a $1.5b AI company built in Taiwan and IPO'ed in Japan, with insightful remarks from an investor with years of experience in both public and private markets. Cherry on the top, masterful moderation by one of the most knowledgeable guys in the semiconductors space (a favorite tech YouTuber of mine). Some of the topics we've covered: ❓Why did Appier IPO in Japan? ❓AI Market evolution over the past 12 years? ❓What are the major market trends today in AI? ❓What's the most (and least) promising application of AI? ❓What will AI funding look like over the next 2-5 years? ❓Are we in an AI bubble? -> Check out the last video Asianometry produced (link in comments). ❓What are the advantages of building in Asia? It was the AI Salon with the best organization I've been to so far (and I've organized 6 in Tokyo myself)! Lots to learn from our friend Chi Ko :) Also fun to see some connections of the Tokyo AI ecosystem, including Mark Birch pitching his first idea, and AI Square showing another iteration of their product (Louis B., your CTO co-founder did a great job pitching!).

The first speaker next week is Martin Amps, showing us his experiments on real-time voice generation. When: 29 October, 7pm - 9:30pm Where: Tokyo, Minato Organizer(s): Michael Makarov Sponsor(s): Code Chrysalis and Pinecone Event page: in the comments.

Another TAI community startup showing great progress, using AI in data analysis! Looking forward to their launch week, culminating in a PH launch.

A TAI community startup going to the DX Week, go check them out on Oct 23rd, and listen to how they are integrating AI agents into sales activities!

Noticed that I'm two weeks late with updates on two other sessions we ran with Tokyo AI (TAI)... This was our third AMAJ (Applied ML and AI, Japanese), the Japanese sub-group of TAI, masterfully pulled together by Henry Cui and Shiro Takagi. Japan should and will be the prime place for AI in Scientific Discovery because this kind of research has been happening here for a while, and because there's also a great deal of synergy with the lab/robotics components that soon will be able to automate research labs (and we'll do soon a session on lab automation as well, right Gergely (Greg) Juhasz?). The first speaker, kindly introduced by our friend Koshu K., was none else than Sony Group CTO and Sony AI CEO Hiroaki Kitano. Kitano-san has been running research on AI in Scientific Discovery for a while, even publishing in Nature[0]. Already in 1993 Kitano-san 1993 got recognitions such as the Computers and Thought Award from IJCAI (of which he eventually became also president, between 2009-2011). The talk was on "Understanding and Controlling Large-Scale Complex Adaptive Systems", and it didn't disappoint! We had Llion Jones, who not only gave us insights into Sakana's work on automating research with AI but also joined the community for an after-hours session :) Llion talked about some of the next possible steps for their research, from improving the AI Scientist pipeline to larger templates and more compute, through using reviewer feedback for iterative improvements, and getting to evolutionary optimization of the agent pipeline. Shiro Takagi went through almost 100 slides like a boss. Shiro has been doing research on AI in Scientific Discovery for several years now. I respect Shiro's work a lot especially because he manages to get amazing collabs just as an independent researcher, without being associated to any particular college. A group of researchers he's part of (AutoRes), and working on this topic, are looking for more collaborators (super team!): https://lnkd.in/gwyTMMNB Next we had Yoshitaka Ushiku, also part of AutoRes, talking about how to marry vision and language models to automate scientific research. The best comment I got on this was a remark on the broad and deep knowledge Yoshitaka showed us on so many topics. Super curious about the outcomes of research he's or will be part of, from the JST-Mirai Program on Research automation in inorganic chemistry, to the JST Moonshot R&D Program on Research automation in organic chemistry, and the RIKEN TRIP-AGIS project on Life Sciences + Materials Research. Finally, Ryota Yamada, also working on accelerating research through the application of AI, made an introduction about the LLM usage cases in life science research. Starting with information extraction from specialized documents, to RAG for databases, and AI Agent workflows. Looking forward to his new startup's progress in AI Robot-driven science, and in building research ontologies. [0] https://lnkd.in/gFgkBRHv

Yesterday with Tokyo AI (TAI), JETRO, and DEEPCORE we ran our 6th monthly AiSalon Tokyo (AIST), with 9 new startups joining our community network, now totaling 54. If we have the same odds as Angel List startups (2.5% become unicorns), we should have found at least 1 unicorn (though with the big visions I've heard about, I'm sure we'll manage to get more than 1)! We had 6 Techstars Japan cohort #1 startups (with Yuki Shirato introducing the AI founders of their program), 2 teams visiting from the EU (brought by our friends from the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation / Stijn Lambrecht), and an early Tokyo AI member with the most promising Japanese AI Agents startup. Here's the list again, and the decks will be available on our Discord community. Big thanks to Rimon PC for their info on the US VC status and on "patent or not to patent?", and for providing us with nutrition! ➡️ Xpress AI (Eduardo Gonzalez): a design and development platform for AI-powered workflows/agents. ➡️ 🐝 InfraHive (Kunal Verma): a data intelligence platform for enterprise sales, finance, and analytics teams. ➡️ Samaria (Techstars '24) (Keerat Sandhu): a manga content platform democratizing manga production with a suite of AI tools. ➡️ Dondon Animation Technologies, Inc. (Shuhong Chen): AI tools to help animators focus on the creative parts while automating the boring parts of anime production. ➡️ Saner.AI (Techstars ‘24) (Giap Vo (Galvin)): helping busy professionals who struggle to remember and use their scattered information, so they can stay informed and focus on what truly matters. ➡️ AssetHub(Techstars '24) (Takuya Goto): a 3D creation tool for game creators empowered by AI. ➡️ Cequence (Martin Ragan): an end-to-end Contract Lifecycle Management platform that automates the entire contracting process. ➡️ AviSense.AI (Gerasimos Arvanitis): AI-based products transforming how vehicles communicate with drivers, with advanced perception and interaction technologies to elevate awareness through Extended Reality (XR). ➡️ AMATAMA Co. (堀内雄一): an integration platform for humanoid robots, based on a hierarchical computer architecture that utilizes neuroscience and AI, as well as a biomechanics simulation of the human body. The session is organized by Tokyo AI (TAI) (Sana T. and myself), hosted at JETRO - Japan External Trade Organization (Momoka Ueda, Ryoma Kanie, Yusuke Kaga, Noriya Tarutani) and kindly sponsored by Rimon PC (thanks, Eric D. Kirsch and David Case) and DEEPCORE (Hiroshi Nemoto).

Another AiSalon Tokyo (AIST) is done, and this time we had the pleasure of hosting the global lead for the AI Salon project, Jeffrey D. Abbott (safe flight back home, Jeffrey!). Fifth Salon, 10 startups, for a total of 45 in the past 5 months. This time we've seen cybersecurity, voice, medical, engineering design, and world model applications. Eddy from Almata showed us Eagle, their predictive vulnerability management platform that proactively identifies, prioritizes, and addresses cyber risks. Boris, part of a group of gaijin founders just moving to Japan to launch, talked about JENOVA, an AI model router that abstracts away the complexities of AI and provides a very user-friendly interface where consumer clients don't get lost. Watanabe-san entertained us with his HARUKA voice generation application, with fantastic quality especially in Japanese, looking forward to a number of applications coming out of this, I heard in the audience a good number of partnership examples (one of the reasons to demo at the Salon!). Manjunatha is building a medical information GenAI platform for Japanese doctors, bringing trustworthy answers with relevant medical sources. Duc rocked the stage with his #1 Product of the Day on PH, an SME-focused chatbot builder. The easiest and cheapest way of handling customer inquiries in any language. Our long-time friends at Braid gave a glimpse into the engineering design software they are building in a trillion-dollar industry. Love their attention to building a team with solid research and engineering backgrounds. Jad from Integral AI talked about his expectations of AGI and how we'll get there through work on Foundation World Models they are developing. With a solid customer base in Japan, it's exciting to see a team originating in Google US coming to build in Japan. Matthew explained how his team leverages AI with a managed software solution for translations focused on the legal and financial domains. While LLMs are definitely automating translations all over the place, the need for a privacy and security-focused platform supporting translation departments of legal and consulting firms will not go away. Finally, Asazawa-san, an IT veteran from ITOCHU, VMware, and Google, showed us how their software can generate B2B sales proposals and scenarios with a click of a button. Thanks again: To JETRO - Japan External Trade Organization (Yusuke Kaga, Natsuho Toyama, Ryoma Kanie, and SHIONO Tatsuhiko) for their continued support in our monthly AIST sessions. To DEEPCORE (Hiroshi Nemoto and Akinori Suenaga) for their operational and nutritional support. To Sana T. and the rest of the Tokyo AI (TAI) for being awesome :) Next sessions: https://lu.ma/sik0n4u6 https://lu.ma/jk34sj2z https://lu.ma/jhmin4av

The first Tokyo AI (TAI) session on AI in Hardware and Robotics (AHR) was fun, and I've learned a lot, not being that deep into the robotics side of AI/ML. Colin Mason talked about how BeEmotion.ai is applying AI for emotion recognition, and how they are combining that for multimodal models, especially those that fit on small devices. Jeremy Siburian ran us through the SOTA in TAMP (Task And Motion Planning), with an example of a cucumber-cutting robot their team worked on, combining AI-based task planners with robot motion planning frameworks. Russ Islam made a pretty entertaining talk on soft robotics, showing stuff I didn't think we were close to (does Terminator 2 + soft robotics ring a bell?). Looking forward to microfluidics-based computers and colloidal robots swimming all over the place! Joseph Isosaki closed with a historical perspective on surgical robotics, with references to the future of humanoid robotics. Happy to see Joseph moving to Japan and applying his knowledge to help Japanese MedTech companies. Thanks for organizing, Apurv Saha, Stefano Zangiacomi, Joseph Isosaki (and we added now Russ Islam to our "AI in Robotics" team at Tokyo AI (TAI)!). And as usual, especially grateful to our patrons at Global Hands-On VC (GHOVC) - Ken Yasunaga, Fumitoshi Onoma, and Shri Dodani! You've been there since the beginnings of our community almost a year ago, we really appreciate your continued support for the Tokyo AI ecosystem! Next sessions: https://lu.ma/sik0n4u6 https://lu.ma/jk34sj2z https://lu.ma/jhmin4av