US and Japan announce new AI partnership with $110m investment

The US and Japanese governments have announced a new academic partnership in artificial intelligence that will receive major investments from leading technology companies.

Here's What We Know

The partnership will see the University of Washington team up with the University of Tsukuba and Carnegie Mellon University team up with Tokyo's Keio University. The $110 million in funding will be provided by NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, Arm, Softbank and a group of nine unnamed Japanese companies.

According to a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Japan, Carnegie Mellon and Keio University will focus on research in the areas of "multimodal and multi-lingual learning, embodied AI or AI for robots, autonomous AI symbiosis with humans, life sciences, and AI for scientific discovery". Carnegie Mellon President Farnham Jahanian called the partnership "advancing AI innovation on a global scale."

The University of Washington and the University of Tsukuba, located in the leading science and technology centres of Seattle and Tsukuba. They will collaborate to "advance research, entrepreneurship, workforce development and social adoption" of AI technologies. The University of Washington will receive $50 million, while NVIDIA and Amazon will each invest $25 million in this area.

The new AI partnership is the third wave of university-corporate initiatives between the US and Japan, following commitments by President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to jointly invest in research. The countries have launched cooperation programmes in the semiconductor and quantum industries.

Biden and Kishida's joint statement emphasised the leaders' commitment to further develop the Hiroshima AI process and strengthen cooperation between national AI security institutions.

Source: The Register