EXAONE Alliance Expands Worldwide

LG's Super-giant AI, EXAONE, is starting the new year with a lot of phone calls. The phone calls are from global leaders of respective industries. On January 3, LG AI Research signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to establish a strategic partnership for the application of EXAONE with Elsevier, a leading global publisher in the field of medical and science technology. It also signed an MOU to collaborative research with Shutterstock, a company with the world's largest amount of stored images on January 9.

The Super-giant AI technology that various domestic and international companies started to develop last year is an unchartered territory where business possibilities are still unverified. That is why it is important for LG AI Research to discover new ways of applying the technology, as well as advancing it. Following the unveiling of Super-giant AI, EXAONE, on December 14, LG AI Research signed an MOU with Woori Bank on December 20 to implement the Super-giant AI for the first time in the banking sector, followed by another MOU with GS Retail in the commerce sector. Through these MOUs, LG AI Research has paved the ways to the finance and retail industries before any other AI research organizations.

 

Elsevier: Discovering Novel Materials by Reading Chemistry Theses

This time, the EXAONE Alliance expanded its boundaries to the world. Elsevier is a Dutch publisher founded in 1880 specializing in academic literature. For 140 years, it has been publishing leading academic journals in the fields of medicine and science, including The Lancet and Cell. At the same time, it is also expanding its business areas through various solutions it developed using its academic journals and patents. Shutterstock is a paid image provider based in New York, U.S., and stores more than 370 million images. As of 2020, Shutterstock is the No. 1 company in the stored image (including photos, illustrations, graphic images, etc.) industry. Last year, it acquired Pattern89, an AI platform company, and established a subsidiary, Shutterstock.AI, to actively use AI in their business.

 

ⓒ Elsevier, Shutterstock website

 

The global agreements were established as part of the strategy for EXAONE’s roadmap. One of the things that EXAONE is promoting is a specialized AI. LG AI Research's collaboration with Elsevier will help in developing a specialized AI in the field of novel material development. LG AI Research signed an agreement with Elsevier to conduct a joint research project on Deep Document Understanding (DDU) in the field of material information. DDU is a technology that uses AI programs to read equations, tables, images and texts in documents, converting them into data that can be used by computers. This used to require a lot of time and effort from expert researchers. For example, chemistry literature contains images, such as molecular structure formulae, that computers cannot recognize through conventional methods. DDU solves this and makes it easier to utilize such knowledge. LG AI Research plans to apply this technology to literature that contain material information in the field of chemistry and medicine. This will significantly accelerate the discovery of new drugs and novel materials that are beneficial to humanity.

 

Shutterstock: The Journey of Developing an AI That Shifts Between Languages and Images

LG AI Research's partnership with Shutterstock will revolve around researching AI that connect images and languages. A special feature and goal of EXAONE is multi-modality. LG AI Research developed an EXAONE model that works with both language and image formats, creating language from images and vice versa. Although Shutterstock has a vast image library, some of the images lack descriptions, which limits their use. EXAONE has the ability to enhance its own capabilities using a library of images and use the enhanced capabilities to tag descriptions to the images. At the same time, it can use its ability to create images from language to supplement the insufficient image categories of the library.

ⓒ Shutterstock website

Since the implementation of Super-giant AI is an unchartered territory, cooperation between companies in this area is also very limited. Thus, the global agreements that LG AI Research signed are very meaningful in this regard. LG AI Research is leading the Super-giant AI sector by testing possibilities of the technology in various sectors through domestic and international partners before other organizations. Its plan is to become a leading global AI research group by creating a virtuous cycle that involves technological development, implementation in the business field, development of data and insight, and then back to novel technological development. Please keep your eyes peeled for the growth of the global EXAONE Alliance.