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Japan Launches New Advanced, Unique Tech Gadgets

Pedestrians walk past a logo of Panasonic Corp outside Panasonic Center in Tokyo. Photo: Reuters
Pedestrians walk past a logo of Panasonic Corp outside Panasonic Center in Tokyo. Photo: Reuters
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Japan Launches New Advanced, Unique Tech Gadgets

Pedestrians walk past a logo of Panasonic Corp outside Panasonic Center in Tokyo. Photo: Reuters
Pedestrians walk past a logo of Panasonic Corp outside Panasonic Center in Tokyo. Photo: Reuters

Clova Friends and Wave are the brand names of smart speakers from Line, the app that is to Japan what Facebook is to the US.

Line is the No. 1 social network in Japan, one that differentiates itself from others with really cute characters as mascots that get used as chat stickers.

Smart Assistants

So the Clova Friends speaker is in the shape of a yellow or a brown bear. It's battery powered, which makes it portable, and Bluetooth-enabled, so it will play music from your phone. It sells for around $60.

Clova Friends and Wave, a larger speaker selling for around $140, are Line's answer to Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple's soon-to-launch HomePod speaker, using Line's own Clova personal assistant, the equivalent of Siri, Alexa and the Google Assistant. The smart speaker comes in the guise of a bright yellow chicken or a brown bear and seems just as smart as Alexa, but it's far cuter.

The functionality is pretty much the same as an Echo or Home, in that Clova will play music, set your alarm, tell you about your calendar and let you make and accept free phone calls. It also tells your fortune.
Yet, it only speaks in Japanese and can only connect to the Japanese version of the Line app.

Distinguished Laptop

The Panasonic Lets Note series is Japan’s answer to the popularity of Apple MacBooks and MacBook Air laptops in the US. These are a premium, more expensive line of computers that are displayed as Made in Japan, a signal to local consumers that differentiates them from Chinese-made Lenovo, Asus, Acer, Apple, Dell and other computers.

For some reason Panasonic, best known in the US for TVs and cameras, has chosen not to sell the Lets Note line in the US. But oh, if we could have these specs. Most computers have been getting smaller, as companies take away things like DVD drives and ethernet ports.

But the Lets Note line offers more on one machine than I've ever seen before. Many of the models on display at the Yodobashi store in Osaka had every port we could dream of: USB C, three regular USBs, an SD card slot, options to plug into projectors, monitors and TVs, and a slot for a SIM card, so if you’re not in a Wi-Fi zone, you can go online via your wireless cell network. And the screen pulls out and becomes a fully functioning tablet as well.

The products start at around $1,300 and go up to $2000.

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Technology

Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
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Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File

American AI giant Anthropic aims to boost the European tech ecosystem as it expands on the continent, product chief Mike Krieger told AFP Thursday at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris.

The OpenAI competitor wants to be "the engine behind some of the largest startups of tomorrow... (and) many of them can and should come from Europe", Krieger said.

Tech industry and political leaders have often lamented Europe's failure to capitalize on its research and education strength to build heavyweight local companies -- with many young founders instead leaving to set up shop across the Atlantic.

Krieger's praise for the region's "really strong talent pipeline" chimed with an air of continental tech optimism at Vivatech.

French AI startup Mistral on Wednesday announced a multibillion-dollar tie-up to bring high-powered computing resources from chip behemoth Nvidia to the region.

The semiconductor firm will "increase the amount of AI computing capacity in Europe by a factor of 10" within two years, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang told an audience at the southern Paris convention center.

Among 100 planned continental hires, Anthropic is building up its technical and research strength in Europe, where it has offices in Dublin and non-EU capital London, Krieger said.

Beyond the startups he hopes to boost, many long-standing European companies "have a really strong appetite for transforming themselves with AI", he added, citing luxury giant LVMH, which had a large footprint at Vivatech.

'Safe by design'

Mistral -- founded only in 2023 and far smaller than American industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic -- is nevertheless "definitely in the conversation" in the industry, Krieger said.

The French firm recently followed in the footsteps of the US companies by releasing a so-called "reasoning" model able to take on more complex tasks.

"I talk to customers all the time that are maybe using (Anthropic's AI) Claude for some of the long-horizon agentic tasks, but then they've also fine-tuned Mistral for one of their data processing tasks, and I think they can co-exist in that way," Krieger said.

So-called "agentic" AI models -- including the most recent versions of Claude -- work as autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that are able to do work over longer horizons with less human supervision, including by interacting with tools like web browsers and email.

Capabilities displayed by the latest releases have raised fears among some researchers, such as University of Montreal professor and "AI godfather" Yoshua Bengio, that independently acting AI could soon pose a risk to humanity.

Bengio last week launched a non-profit, LawZero, to develop "safe-by-design" AI -- originally a key founding promise of OpenAI and Anthropic.

'Very specific genius'

"A huge part of why I joined Anthropic was because of how seriously they were taking that question" of AI safety, said Krieger, a Brazilian software engineer who co-founded Instagram, which he left in 2018.

Anthropic is still working on measures designed to restrict their AI models' potential to do harm, he added.

But it has yet to release details of its "level 4" AI safety protections foreseen for still more powerful models, after activating ASL (AI Safety Level) 3 to corral the capabilities of May's Claude Opus 4 release.

Developing ASL 4 is "an active part of the work of the company", Krieger said, without giving a potential release date.

With Claude 4 Opus, "we've deployed the mitigations kind of proactively... safe doesn't have to mean slow, but it does mean having to be thoughtful and proactive ahead of time" to make sure safety protections don't impair performance, he added.

Looking to upcoming releases from Anthropic, Krieger said the company's models were on track to match chief executive Dario Amodei's prediction that Anthropic would offer customers access to a "country of geniuses in a data center" by 2026 or 2027 -- within limits.

Anthropic's latest AI models are "genius-level at some very specific things", he said.

"In the coming year... it will continue to spike in particular aspects of things, and still need a lot of human-in-the-loop coordination," he forecast.