Can Japan, which lags behind, become an “AI-advanced country”? What will the future of humanity be as the times change? Interview with SHIFT AI's Shota Kiuchi

What's SHIFT AI

With the mission of "Making Japan an AI-advanced nation," SHIFT AI is involved in AI-focused communities and media businesses. In order to solve issues such as the shortage of AI talent and the delayed use of AI in Japan, SHIFT AI operates an AI university with 8,000 members, aiming to accelerate the singularity.

Please tell us about your career and why you decided to focus on the AI ​​field.

Shota Kiuchi (hereinafter, Kiuchi): I like games, and I was originally involved with programming from the age of 10. My encounter with AI was an extension of game programming. When I was 15, I was making a shooting game, and I needed to use AI to design the enemy character's movements. That's how I started learning AI technology.

At that time, deep learning had not yet been released, so I started by developing simple rule-based AI while learning the underlying technology.

Later, when I was 18, a book written by Ray Kurzweil, an authority on AI, was published in Japan called "The Singularity is Near." After reading it, I felt that as neural networks evolved, AI would naturally surpass humans and the singularity would come.

On the other hand, Japan's IT education was already 10 or 20 years behind the rest of the world at that time. I had been programming since I was 10 years old, which was a very rare position.

At the time, there were no schools that taught programming properly, so I thought I would launch a service that would be the first in Japan to teach specialized programming one-on-one. That was SAMURAI ENGINEER, which I launched in 2013.

SAMURAI ENGINEER was launched by a single person, and has taught a total of 45,000 people to date. I was originally convinced that resolving the shortage of IT engineers would accelerate the IT revolution and lead to the next AI revolution, so I worked on it for 10 years, but now programming is included in compulsory education, and the engineer shortage has also been resolved over the past 10 years.

The shortage of engineers was also being resolved as a social issue, and I sold my company because I thought that I could have accelerated the singularity and contributed to the IT revolution even a little.

About two years later, the generative AI boom came. So I thought, "Now we need to educate people on generative AI," and that's how I got to where I am today. As the world moves toward the realization of the singularity, I strongly feel that Japanese people also need to improve their AI literacy.

This is a bit of a digression, but actually, when I was 8 years old, I became interested in nuclear fusion energy, and at that time, my dream was to become a scientist. Sam Altman of OpenAI also lists nuclear fusion as one of the three sacred treasures of the singularity society, along with AGI (artificial general intelligence) and UBI (universal basic income). It just so happened that I was interested in it and wanted to be involved in it from that time.

What was the trigger?

Kiuchi: I wondered, "Why does humanity wage war?" When I was talking with my father at the time, I learned that behind it was a vested interest structure, and something like an energy war was occurring.

If that's the case, I thought that if something like free energy was established, various costs and prices would go down, and at the same time, the vested interest structure would be destroyed and wars would be prevented. That's what made me want to become a scientist.

In the end, I became obsessed with programming at the age of 10, so there was a time when I forgot about my dream of becoming a scientist, but looking back now, I can say that both nuclear fusion and the singularity are technologies that will take humanity to the next stage. I feel motivated to explore such technology with excitement and implement it in society.