It’s still heartening to see that big companies can still invest in basic research, with much of the work done in Silicon Valley. Japanese telecommunications firm NTT announced a series of research projects last week that could pave the way for better AI and more energy efficient data centers. At a press conference in San Francisco, NTT researchers including Kazu Gomi, CEO of NTT Research, said the company has created a new large language model (LLM) integration that can see and process graphical elements of documents. I caught up with Gomi for an interview during the event. Gomi also said NTT has initiated a new field of science, “the physics of intelligence,” to study sustainable and trustworthy AI. It teamed up with Harvard University to study brain science, and it is working on making a “digital twin” of the human heart. It’s also exploring quantum computing. How NTT Research approaches its basic science explorations | Kazu Gomi interview | VentureBeat