The Japanese Ministry of Education plans to develop generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology which has the ability to generate scientific and medical hypotheses by studying research papers and research images to help the research process.

Reporting from Nikkei on Sunday, the Japanese government hopes that by developing its own AI technology, it can guarantee data security while increasing national competitiveness.

Currently, AI development is focused on the realm of scientific and medical research, which is estimated to cost 30 billion yen (Rp. 3.2 trillion). Japan's Ministry of Education will raise funding for the initial development phase in the 2024 fiscal year.

The Riken research institute will lead the development of the AI. It is planned that this AI technology will be tested in external laboratories and companies starting from the 2025 fiscal year.

The project is expected to last eight years and aims to have the technology available to researchers nationwide starting in fiscal year 2031.

Additional research data will be fed into generative AI to make it capable of identifying substances that cause disease or designing materials for use in medical or industrial fields.

Riken has a collection of research data that can be used to improve generative AI capabilities. AI will study data relating to candidate compounds or diagnostic images used in research in the medical and industrial fields.

The AI technology will also help write papers by researching past literature. In the future, researchers may interact with AI to discover and test new hypotheses.

Currently, US companies such as Open AI and Google are leading the trend in developing generative AI. Meanwhile in Japan, NTT and SoftBank are creating an AI model that is compatible with Japanese. This technology is expected to increase productivity in the administrative sector such as creating electronic letters, documents and minutes.