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Comment by frays | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered, at what point do tech companies choose to open physical offices in different regions?

It's very likely the engineering talent in San Francisco is better than that of Tokyo. Is Tokyo just going to be a sales office? Or is there something I'm missing about this move by OpenAI.

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I would imagine they have a small engineering team in Japan to help give the best feedback on localization of the model outputs.

I think the bigger picture is that Japan has promoted strong support for AI companies and OpenAI in particular, and so the company wants to positively reinforce that as a model for other countries to emulate.

Also likely useful having field deployed Japanese sales engineers capable of breaking legacy Japanese business processes into agentic-like workflows.

There will be no engineering presence in Japan for the time being

I wonder if factors like maybe a decent chunk of engineers might be open to relocating to Japan (even if temporarily) play a role. After all, there's a lot of overlap between interests in aspects of Japanese culture (or Japan in general) and being a tech person. So maybe they expect to attract talent with the added prospect of being able to spend a couple of years there.

I recall SpaceX starting to do some similar stuff to entice their staff from California to relocate to the far less affluent corner of Texas their Starship facilities are in.

> It's very likely the engineering talent in San Francisco is better than that of Tokyo

I'm not sure why this would be the case. From a capitalist point of view, the engineering talent in Tokyo is at least as skilled if not moreso since Japan has better education outcomes, and, the workforce is more exploitable for raw hours.

You're overlooking the fact that a huge majority of tech workers are not originally from the SV area. The US is a huge immigration destination, especially in tech, whereas Japan is a nearly impossible place to move to, not least of all because of immigration laws.

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