“Learning AI – An Introduction to Generative AI”

The inaugural seminar of Kenja’s “Learning AI” series.

On the 1st of August 2024, Kenja K.K. launched its “Learning AI” series with the inaugural seminar titled “An Introduction to Generative AI,” presented by Ted Katagi. Over 30 professionals attended the hybrid session, held from 8-9 PM, which served as the closing event of Venture Café Tokyo’s 299th Thursday Gathering at CIC Tokyo Toranomon.

Ted Katagi began the seminar with an overview of generative AI, covering its systems, abilities, and limitations. He mentioned the two perspectives on AI’s future: one optimistic about exponential growth driven by tech innovation, and the other cautious about potential slowdowns due to data and energy constraints. But regardless of which, he stressed the need to merge human intelligence and AI to navigate the unpredictable yet rapidly approaching future.

Continuing on, Katagi discussed the several key innovations and breakthroughs that advanced the generative AI field, such as LLMs, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). He outlined the technology’s capacity to create text, images, music, and code, and explored a number of potential applications, including customer service, content creation, and healthcare, illustrating how generative AI can enhance productivity and creativity.

Following that, Katagi addressed the main problems of generative AI, such as security, privacy, and accuracy and offered solutions to overcome them, drawing from his experiences with the development of Kenja AI. He also highlighted the idea of “Multiple Brains,” where users create separate corpora for each department, project, or team, as opposed to “One Brain,” where AI is implemented organization-wide through a central system, potentially causing privacy issues.

To close, Katagi touched upon the common challenges organizations face, like the limited AI knowledge among employees, the high volume of data to manually organize, and the central AI team’s lack of resources and time to set up RAG at a user level. He suggested that these issues stem from the “One Brain” strategy and suggested that the “Multiple Brains” concept could eliminate bottlenecks by empowering the employees to quickly set up RAG on their own.

Ted Katagi is the CEO and Founder of Kenja K.K., an AI-enabled cloud collaboration platform company for enterprise customers. Prior to Kenja, he served as the Head of Private Equity Asia for Fidelity Investments, the Chief Marketing Officer for Vodafone Japan and Verizon Wireless (West), and the Global Head of Commercial Strategy for Vodafone. Katagi has also previously worked for tech giant, IBM, and the management consulting firm, Bain & Company.

Guided by Katagi’s visionary leadership, Kenja K.K. ventured into the generative AI field with Kenja AI, prioritizing data control, flexibility, accuracy, collaboration, privacy, and security. An end-to-end AI system that manages everything from memory management and filtering to retrieval and LLM communication, Kenja Ai is designed as the ideal companion for enterprises seeking to leverage generative AI without compromise.

Venture Café

Venture Café is a global network dedicated to advancing local innovation ecosystems through impactful programming, spaces, storytelling, and broad engagement. Named by the Brookings Institute and Startup Genome as a best practice for activating innovation ecosystems, they aim to build a future where everyone can participate in the innovation process to change the world.