LG AI Research Establishes Strategic Partnerships With Three Companies in the Field of Finance, Retail, and Metaverse

The super-giant artificial intelligence (AI) model 'EXAONE' unveiled by LG AI Research at ‘LG AI Talk Concert’ on December 14 is drawing great attention from the market. Only one week after the unveiling of the super-giant AI on December 14, LG AI Research signed business agreements with companies in the field of finance (Woori Bank), retail (GS Retail), and metaverse (VA Corporation) on strategic partnerships, gearing itself up for creating the super-giant AI alliance.

The super-giant AI is an AI model based on a hyperscale computing infrastructure that aspires to mimic a human brain structure to power independent learning, thinking, and decision-making; an area that is seeing an intensifying competition in the global market. In addition to LG, South Korean tech giants such as NAVER and Kakao also jumped into the super-giant AI development market this year, catching up fast with global IT companies such as Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Huawei.

LG AI Research’s EXAONE is a super-giant AI that has learned more than 600 billion phrases and 250 million high-resolution images attached with texts. It is also capable of tuning 300 billion different parameters (variables), the largest in South Korea. Parameters refer to something similar to synapses in the human brain that deliver information between neurons.

LG AI Research signed the business agreements while other South Korean and international competitors are still at the stage of focusing on multimodal AI research involving conversion of language models and languages into images. The partnerships are meaningful in that it signals the start of LG AI Research's development of an AI model that is ready to be applied to a broad range of industries.

Photo 1. Kyunghoon Bae, Representative of LG AI Research (right) and Weoncheol Hwang, CDO of Woori Bank signing an MOU on strategic partnership.

On December 20, LG AI Research signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Woori Bank on the implementation of a super-giant AI for the first time in the banking industry. Woori Bank plans to develop a futuristic store service, a next-generation financial service, and ‘AI Banker’, a program that learns financial language to provide services that are specialized for the finance sector.

Photo 2. Kyunghoon Bae, Representative of LG AI Research (right) and Jonghyuk Lee, CTO of GS Retail New Tech signing an MOU on strategic partnership.

Following the partnership with Woori Bank, LG AI Research joined hands with GS Retail to develop an AI model that can provide customized client services to enable GS Retail to take hold of the leadership in the E-commerce market, where an intensifying competition is also taking place. In addition, LG AI Research plans to develop an AI model that recommends cooking recipes for different ingredients, and other new conceptual AI models that can play active roles in the pet and quick commerce markets.

Photo 3. Kyunghoon Bae, Representative of LG AI Research (left) and Dongeon Kim, CEO of VA Corporation signing an MOU on strategic partnership.

Through the partnership with VA Corporation, LG AI Research is going to launch a joint development project for ‘AI Human’ that can be applied to an infinite number of areas, including kiosks and client services. While the conventional ‘AI Human’ is only capable of mimicking human voices or engaging in limited types of conversation based on data that it acquired, VA Corporation plans to create a true ‘AI Human’ that is capable of understanding emotions embedded in language by integrating 'Vision' with EXAONE, a model that generates conversational language models, facial expressions, and gestures.

The reason why companies that are seeking to take the leadership in the super-giant AI market are joining forces to build an ecosystem through an alliance is because acquiring high quality data that AI models can learn is as important as having hyperscale computing infrastructures. Even if one company develops a super-giant AI model that has excellent learning capabilities, the model cannot be utilized to its full capacity without sufficient data to learn.

LG AI Research’s formation of the alliance took place while other South Korean and international competitors are still at the stage of focusing on multimodal AI research involving conversion of language models and languages into images. The partnerships are meaningful in that it signals the start of LG AI Research's development of an AI model that is ready to be applied to the broader area of industries.

With the goal of ‘developing top 1% of AI experts in each area’, LG AI Research plans to develop specialized AI modules that can be used, like software programs, by utilizing EXAONE’s learning data that is used in various industries. In particular, the super-giant AI model EXAONE is attracting more market attention as it can be applied to a broad range of industries, making direct contributions to business model innovation, unlike products from big tech companies that are based on Internet services.

Since the unveiling of EXAONE, LG AI Research has been receiving calls from companies in various fields, including medicine, education and design. LG AI Research’s need to establish a collective ecosystem to gain access to various specialized industry data for the super-giant AI to learn and the interest of various companies that urgently need to innovate their business models through digital transformation fit perfectly together. These are expected to create great synergistic effects.

When LG AI Research and global companies create a platform centered on EXAONE through partnerships, then a super-giant AI version of new ecosystems such as Android (Google) and iOS (Apple) could also be created here in South Korea.

Present and Future of LG AI Research through LG AI Talk Concert - The Best of 2021 (Link)