Rakuten Group is expanding its AI team under the stewardship of a Google veteran and building models with a focus on cost efficiency.
Ting Cai, now three years into his tenure at the head of the e-commerce pioneer’s artificial intelligence team, has the task of creating AI systems that would augment the company’s many businesses and support the handling of commercial transactions at a minimal cost. He oversees a team that’s grown to 1,000 this year and has a battery of “thousands” of Nvidia chips to work with.
Tokyo-based Rakuten is wrestling with a struggling mobile business and constant competition in online shopping, both of which could get a significant boost from effective deployment of new AI tools. But the emphasis on doing that profitably from early on is where the company stands out from other large tech firms.
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