Tadao Nagasaki, a longtime tech exec who led Japan-related operations for Amazon Web Services and F5, is joining OpenAI to head up the company’s new hub in Tokyo, its first office in Asia.
Nagasaki previously spent more than 12 years at AWS. Before that, he held a similar role for Seattle security giant F5 for more than a decade.
“Now is the moment for AI to become the theme of next decades,” Nagasaki wrote on LinkedIn. “Day one again.”
Microsoft-backed OpenAI said it picked Japan as its first Asian office “for its global leadership in technology, culture of service, and a community that embraces innovation.” It also announced that it is releasing a GPT-4 custom model optimized for the Japanese language.
“Our new local presence also gets us closer to leading businesses like Daikin, Rakuten, and TOYOTA Connected who are using ChatGPT Enterprise to automate complex business processes, assist in data analysis, and optimize internal reporting,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “ChatGPT also helps accelerate the efforts of local governments, such as Yokosuka City, which is leveraging the technology to improve the efficiency of public services in Japan.”
San Francisco-based OpenAI has additional global offices in Dublin and London.
Japan is the fourth-largest economy in the world. AWS announced last week it was contributing $25 million to a new AI-focused partnership between universities in the U.S. and Japan. The cloud giant also said in January it would invest around $15 billion by 2027 in Japan.
Seattle-area tech giant Microsoft separately announced last week that it is investing $2.9 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure in Japan.
Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech ecosystem:
— Matt Welsh, co-founder and former chief architect at Seattle-based large language model startup Fixie.ai, has departed to work on a new computing platform based on large language models.
His new startup is stealthy and Welsh tells GeekWire he’s not ready to reveal details yet.
“It’s with a mixture of excitement and sadness that I’ve decided to move on from Fixie, which I co-founded in 2022,” Welsh wrote on LinkedIn. “Fixie has pivoted and is now doing some exciting things in the space of real-time conversational AI, but my passions lie elsewhere.”
Before helping launch Fixie, Welsh was an engineering leader at Apple, Google, Xnor.ai, and OctoML.
Fixie raised $17 million last year. At the time, Welsh was the company’s CEO. Another co-founder, Hessam Bagherinezhad, left in September and is now at OpenAI. Co-founders Justin Uberti and Zach Koch remain at Fixie.
— Jeff Bogdan, a longtime engineer at Microsoft who joined the company 33 years ago, said he was laid off from the Redmond tech giant. Bogdan was most recently director of learning and development on the Windows team. “After abundant reflection, I have concluded that I am nowhere close to the ‘R word,'” Bogdan wrote on LinkedIn. “There is still so much that I want to contribute. So now begins the journey of finding my second career.”
— Seattle startup Yuzi, which helps support new moms, added veteran tech leader Sarah Daniels as a strategic advisor.
