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The story
Noetra, a domestic AI company backed by 44 Japanese firms including SoftBank, NEC, Sony, and Honda, with roughly ¥1 trillion in support from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), has President Hirotora Tamba voicing alarm: “If we fail, there’s no coming back.”
On 5ch, commenters pointed out that the key researchers behind GPT and NVIDIA were largely immigrants, joked cynically that METI’s involvement alone spells doom, and voiced pessimism that “even ¥10 trillion wouldn’t help — Japan just doesn’t have enough AI talent.”
Noetra, an artificial intelligence development company backed by 44 domestic firms including SoftBank, NEC, Sony Group, and Honda, with roughly ¥1 trillion in total support from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and others. It is the core company tasked with developing a domestic foundation model to serve as the “brain” for AI operating in the real world — so-called “physical AI” — including self-driving cars and robots. “This is our last chance. If we fail once, there’s no second try.” So declares Hirotora Tamba, who has taken the post of president and representative director. On why it must be homegrown…
Source: nikkei.com / Read the original article
What people said
Companies dumped their employees, so patriotism and company loyalty are dead, and all the talented people are fleeing overseas.
Japan and Japanese companies are left with nothing but useless salary thieves like me lol
born in Russia, raised in Israel.
Studied at the University of Toronto under Nobel physics laureate Geoffrey Hinton.
Went to Google together with Geoffrey.
The one who recruited them to Google —
Fei-Fei Li, raised in rural China.
Princeton, neuroscience.
Founded Stanford's Human-Centered AI Lab.
Li went to Google Cloud.
Geoffrey and the others went to Google Brain.
Geoffrey's British too, by the way.
Besides Ilya there's another one, Alex —
Alex is the pioneer who brought AI to PCs using NVIDIA GPUs.
NVIDIA owes where it is today to these three.
None of them are American.
Elon Musk —
South Africa.
Peter Thiel, the godfather of the PayPal Mafia and big boss at Palantir —
born in Germany, raised in South Africa.
Where exactly are the Americans in all this?
Ugh, purists are exhausting.
we can't even produce originality.
Nobody takes responsibility anyway.
The moment I saw that, I knew this was doomed.
With METI, the ultimate jinx, attached to it, it's completely over.
The moment the investment dries up, it's over.
If it were the latest version I'd be all for it, but what's the point of funding something that's already behind? Just another vested-interest racket.
I'd get it if they threw a huge budget at something on par with the latest US/China AI, but
funding something that's already behind — isn't that just wasting tax money?
I'd get it if they poured a huge budget into something on par with the latest US/China AI, but
throwing a huge budget at a version that's already behind — isn't that just wasting tax money?
Develop the latest model first, then go all in at once.
Building just one frontier LLM probably costs about that much anyway.
And plenty of projects burn that much money and still flop — that's just normal.
There just aren't enough people who can actually develop AI.
Same reason Toyota's behind on self-driving despite having plenty of money.
In the end,
of course it's going to fail — this is a one-shot bet that's not allowed to fail.
The strength of the US
is capital that can prop up perpetually money-losing startups,
and the ultra-rich who make that possible.
Even if OpenAI or Anthropic fail, there are endless replacements waiting.
That's depth of bench.
Corporate slaves, bureaucrats, bank employees — none of them can pull this off.
They start infighting immediately,
too busy dodging responsibility and blaming everyone else.
That "ultra-rich who make that possible" —
that's money from wealthy people worldwide,
not just American money.
That's exactly its biggest strength, and
it's not remotely for the benefit of the American public.
Meanwhile, Japan's tax money and policy aren't for the benefit of its citizens either.
Sorry to the guy in Re: #1, but on the macro level,
this is nothing more than a sacrificial offering so politicians and bureaucrats can look like they're doing something.
A Japanese AI company —
Preferred Networks.
Then got overtaken and left in the dust by latecomers.
They had foresight.
They had vision.
So why?
Background and Key Points
Noetra sits inside a specific Japanese institutional pattern: METI (経済産業省), the industrial-policy ministry, assembling a keiretsu-style consortium of 44 firms — SoftBank, NEC, Sony, Honda among them — to build a “national champion” in a strategic technology, much as it has done before with semiconductors and displays. ¥1 trillion (roughly $6.7 billion) is a genuinely large sum by Japanese startup standards, but the thread’s own numbers put it in perspective: a single frontier US model can cost that much to train, and US hyperscalers spend multiples of it per quarter. Noetra’s stated target isn’t a ChatGPT rival — it’s “physical AI,” the foundation models meant to run self-driving cars and robots, a domain where Japan still has manufacturing and hardware strength even after ceding ground in general-purpose LLMs.
The thread doesn’t really split on whether Japan is behind — everyone agrees on that. It splits on why failure is treated as near-certain: one camp (post 8, 55) points to a structural talent shortage, arguing Japan’s exam system and corporate culture don’t produce or retain the kind of researchers who built GPT and NVIDIA’s software stack; another camp (52, 56) argues ¥1 trillion failing is just normal AI economics, and the real gap is access to patient mega-capital, not raw talent. Post 48’s one-line pushback against the “none of them are American” recitation is the only real friction in the thread, and it goes unanswered.
What’s absent is any mention of METI’s actual track record with these consortium bets — Elpida, Japan Display — which failed for reasons closer to governance and market timing than talent. Readers unfamiliar with amakudari (post 13) should note it’s a real, documented practice of retired bureaucrats taking paid board seats at firms their ministry funded, not just cynical shorthand.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Business News+) thread [AI] Noetra President Tamba’s Anxiety over Domestic AI Development: “If We Fail, There’s No Coming Back”.
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