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IOWN: NTT’s AI-Powered, Photonic Future
At NTT’s R&D Forum 2024, the Japanese tech giant unveiled an ambitious roadmap that bridges today’s digital challenges with tomorrow’s technological breakthroughs.
The event showcased how NTT’s long-anticipated IOWN (Innovative Optical and Wireless Network) technology is moving from concept to commercial reality, while simultaneously advancing a unique vision for AI, utilizing the low-power, high performance tsuzumi model.
As the first Japanese large language model included in Microsoft’s Model as a Service lineup, tsuzumi represents a different approach to AI development. Rather than competing on size, it focuses on efficiency and specialized capabilities. The model excels at Japanese language processing and business-specific applications, with particular strength in handling graphs and tables common in Japanese business contexts.
The Path to Commercial Innovation
NTT’s IOWN initiative (6:42), originally targeted for 2030, is already delivering real-world results. In a striking demonstration of the technology’s potential, NTT showcased a classical music performance spanning 700 kilometers, with musicians connected by optical networks achieving a mere 20-millisecond latency — equivalent to musicians standing just three meters apart on the same…
