I live in Japan and follow the news in Japanese, and I’ve been surprised at how quickly awareness of ChatGPT has spread in the government and the mainstream media here. The prime minister met Sam Altman last month [1] and has mentioned generative AI in official statements [2, in Japanese]. Every day I see articles in the Japanese press about it. This morning’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun—both digital and paper editions—has a detailed guide to prompt engineering [3, in Japanese, firewalled].

I am on the faculty of a university in Tokyo, and next week I’m going to be giving a couple of online workshops for the staff members in my department. I plan to show them how they can use GPT-4 in their work: translating and summarizing documents, writing and polishing e-mails, composing Excel functions, brainstorming, etc.

Interest seems high, but usage is still limited. I sent out a survey yesterday to people planning to attend the workshops. One of the questions was “How much have you used ChatGPT, Google Bard, or other LLMs?” Of the 26 who have replied so far, only two replied “frequently.” Half have used them “only a little,” and 11 have not used them yet at all.

[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/OpenAI-CEO-vows-...

[2] https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/101_kishida/actions/202304/25shi...

[3] https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC1177N0R10C23A4000000/