During the traditional Chinese New Year, the American artificial intelligence team OpenAI released the "text generation**" large model SORA, which showed the industry-leading level and caused a global shock. Correspondingly, overseas large-scale model teams such as Runway and PIKA are preparing to recruit and start a head-to-head competition with Sora.
At the same time, the field of artificial intelligence in Japan has not seen waves for a long time. Although, in June last year, some Japanese companies announced plans to develop or release large models for free, which is the basic technology of industrial intelligence, but so far there has been no progress that can be publicized. You must know that in the last wave of the global mobile Internet economic boom, Japan did not give birth to a global multinational company, and therefore missed the mobile Internet dividend for a whole decade. Although Japan's Internet development started early, neither the entrepreneurial environment, talent mechanism nor mobile payment has been able to provide a relatively "fertile" growth environment for mobile applications, and various reasons have led to the development of Japan's mobile Internet being left behind by the United States and China.
In the past 20 years, the momentum of Japan's innovative economic development has been obviously insufficient, and it has lagged behind in the global mobile Internet field and the era of artificial intelligence. Looking at the longer term, 30 years after the loss of Japanese companies in the 90s of the last century, the global ranking of Japanese companies is declining, and the decline in the competitiveness of enterprises as the core force of the economy indicates that the competitiveness of a country's economy has also gone out of the same trend.
Recently, there was a surprise that Japan's nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in 2023 was overtaken by Germany after being converted into US dollars, falling from third in the world to fourth in the world. In fact, this is just the appearance, behind the ranking swap is a comprehensive embodiment of the endogenous competitiveness of a country's economy.
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Japan will have 1,607 hours of annual work per capita in 2022, 20% more than Germany. According to the World Bank's 2022 data, Japan's real GDP per capita for the working-age population aged 15 to 64 is 6$160,000, which is 10% less than in Germany. In other words, Japan's labor force has been working for a relatively longer period of time, but it has not produced more benefits, which means that Japan's labor efficiency is lower than that of Germany.
This is also reflected in the GDP growth figures of both countries. Japan's "Asahi Shimbun" pointed out that in the long run, Germany's economic growth rate obviously exceeds that of Japan, and the gap between the economic scale of the two countries is also narrowing year by year. According to the International Monetary Organization, the average real growth rate of the economies of the two countries from 2000 to 2022 was 12%, compared to only 07%。
Why is Japan getting lost in the mobile Internet economy? And why is Japan's labor efficiency lower than Germany's?
* Deep-seated factors cannot avoid the problem of aging. With a declining birthrate and an aging population, it is almost inevitable that Japan's economy will be overtaken by the powers behind it. According to the 2023 Population Projection Statistical Report released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan, the proportion of people over 65 years old in the total population is 291%, compared to 22 in Germany in 2022 for those aged 65 and over4%。In Japan, the aging and declining labor force, which are the primary factors of economic growth, contribute negatively to economic growth and are irreversible in the short term, suggesting that the downturn in the Japanese economy is inevitable and long-term to some extent. As a result, it is an urgent issue to improve labor productivity, which is considered to be at a low level, as Japan has a declining birthrate and an aging population.
Moreover, the biggest obstacle to innovation is the serious hierarchy gap. In Japanese society, which pays great attention to the level of class, the upper class is most concerned about the maintenance and continuation of the hierarchy, and innovation often brings about changes in the hierarchy, which the higher class does not want to see, although they have the best resources, they maintain a natural vigilance against innovation, and even resents and hinders the decline of the class that may be brought about by innovation. The middle and lower classes hope to bring opportunities to change their lives through innovation, but they lack the resources needed for innovation and have a huge fear of failure. At the same time, the low-level innovation is often denied attention and the opportunity to maximize their own interests, so for many years, the central bank's zero interest rate and monetary and fiscal policies have been tilted towards large corporations, and the gap between the rich and the poor in Japan has become more and more prominent, and the economic growth dividends enjoyed by the general public are minimal, which has further hindered the development of innovation.
According to the report of the American Information Technology and Innovation Association, since the beginning of the 21st century, the world's two real innovation centers are China and the United States, especially in the past decade, and Europe and Japan are "not enough" in emerging industry innovation. The National Competitiveness Ranking Report on cutting-edge technology research released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute also shows that Japan is in the top 10 in only seven fields, including quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography, and compared with China and the United States, Japan has lagged far behind in the field of emerging technologies.
In order to avoid a trap similar to Japan's loss of 30 years, China needs to take the path of innovative development in the context of the intensifying trend of social aging, on the one hand, to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and break the mechanism of class solidification, on the other hand, to provide entrepreneurial conditions for young people with dreams and lack of capital, and at the same time to provide opportunities for investors who have wealth but may have lost their entrepreneurial ability and entrepreneurial impulse to invest in young people, and combine the needs of the two through market mechanisms.
China is building an innovative country, and the most important point is to give full play to the institutional advantages of socialist countries in concentrating on major tasks, concentrate investment and key research in key areas, and make effective breakthroughs in a number of major scientific and technological fields. In addition, we should also pay attention to cultivating an innovation ecosystem, forming long-term support for the development of science and technology, continuously stimulating the innovation vitality of business entities, cultivating technology-based start-up enterprises, specialized and new small and medium-sized enterprises, and leading science and technology enterprises with strong R&D capabilities, so as to form a dynamic mechanism that can continuously emerge future technologies and disruptive innovations.
*: International Business Daily Author: Lu Hong.