Rakuten Group is expanding its AI team under the leadership of a Google veteran and building models with a focus on cost efficiency.
Ting Cai, who has led the e-commerce pioneer’s artificial intelligence team for three years, is tasked with creating AI systems that would augment the company’s many activities and support the processing of business transactions at minimal cost. He oversees a team that has grown to 1,000 this year and has a bank of “thousands” of Nvidia chips to work with.
Tokyo-based Rakuten is grappling with a struggling mobile sector and continued competition in online shopping, both of which could benefit from a significant boost from the effective deployment of new AI tools. But it’s its focus on profitability from the start that sets the company apart from other big tech companies.