Co-founded by Dr. Noriyuki Kojima and Professor Jungo Kasai, both graduates of top AI Ph.D. programs in the U.S., Kotoba Technologies is a cross-border startup where expertise in state-of-the-art NLP (Natural Language Processing) and HPC (High-Performance Computing) from the U.S. and Japan converges.

The journey of Kotoba Technologies began when the co-founders, inspired by OpenAI's GPT-2 and GPT-3 during their Ph.D. research, recognized the English-centric nature of GPT-3. This realization led them to develop a Japanese-centric large language model (LLM) utilizing Fugaku, which was once the world's fastest supercomputer (at that time, it ranked second). Our mission has resonated with many distinguished HPC and NLP researchers, forming a team of exceptional individuals.

Building on the success of uniting people in the Fugaku project, our co-founders are now dedicated to bringing together researchers and developers for the practical application of LLMs in society. They firmly believe in bridging the gap in LLM deployment between English and non-English languages, recognizing the significant opportunity to enhance the technical capabilities of LLMs for a variety of practical uses.

Our vision is attracting a growing number of talented researchers and engineers, many of whom are central to Japan’s open-sourced LLM projects, arguably the most active in the world. People in our team have experiences in leveraging supercomputers like Fugaku and ABCI and engaging in large-scale government-funded LLM projects such as LLM-JP, among others.

The name “Kotoba” (言葉) in Japanese signifies “language.” The character “言” represents the verb “to say,” while “葉” means “leaf.” This term originates from an ancient Japanese poem by Kino Tsurayuki, which metaphorically describes language as a seed of the human mind, spreading like leaves. We aspire for our technology to be "the seed" that disseminates across society "like leaves."