LG AI Research forms 'Hyperscale' AI alliance with 13 companies

LG AI Research unveiled an alliance network consisting of 13 corporations and organizations based in South Korea and abroad on Tuesday. 

There are four LG subsidiaries within the Expert AI Alliance, namely LG Electronics Inc., LG Chem Ltd., LG Uplus, and LG CNS. 

California-base internet juggernaut Google and New York-based stock photography provider Shutterstock have joined from the United States. Dutch publisher Elsevier also joined. 

South Korean healthcare providers, The Korea University Medical Center and Hanyang University Hospital are part of the alliance. 

Finance heavyweight Woori Financial Group, public broadcaster EBS, and visual production platform VA Corporation have joined as well. 

At the heart of the alliance is Exaone. 

The hyperscale AI engine was unveiled on Dec. 14, 2021.

Scientists at the LG research center have been developing Exaone into an AI system that can think, learn, and make judgments like a human by learning large-scale data on its own.

Exaone boasts 300 billion parameters and is equipped with multi-modal capabilities to acquire and process information related to nearly all aspects of human communication – not just written and spoken languages.

That means the AI’s use case will not be confined to a game of go or writing but applicable to nearly all business sectors. 

Parameters are where AI’s learned data via deep learning gets stored and often used as a measure of how well a model is performing. In human physiology, it is comparable to synapses. 

“Exaone is optimized for business-to-business (B2B) networks,” the institute explained. “As such, it has a different starting point than Hyperscale AIs by Kakao or Naver that are made to be used in business-to-customer (B2C) services.”

A THREE-STAGE STRATEGY 

At the time of Exaone reveal last year, LG AI Research announced a three-stage strategy of adoption by LG affiliates, formation of global alliance, and popularization.

As part of the second stage, participating companies to the multinational alliance will receive a few benefits. 

Exaone Tuning is a technology that shortens the duration of the partnering companies’ AI development. By reducing the number of parameters needed for an AI, the operation will be quicker and the accuracy will jump four-fold. 

Within the first half of this year, it will provide an application programming interface (API) to the alliance members. The API will encompass four technologies including Q&As, text categorization, and image generation.

In the latter half, Exaone Playground will be provided to the members, which allows the companies to use Exaone on the web without additional coding.

USE CASES

The partnering companies, in turn, will help with the continued advancement and adoption of Exaone-based AI services.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google will assist the strengthening of Exaone offerings through the Cloud TPU, its AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC.)

Google Cloud's Cloud TPU plays the role of accelerating the speed in which machine learning models learn. The speed hike is especially effective in natural language processing (NLP.)

With Woori Bank, the collaboration will focus on developing a model for recognizing atypical documents and languages specific to the finance industry. 

The two sides will also work on developing an AI bank clerk. Instead of merely repeating scenario-specific answers, the AI human in development will understand the banking language and the customers' intent to offer real time consultations. 

State-run educational broadcaster EBS will increase its AI adoption in teaching mathematics. The broadcaster is currently running an AI learning mate named Peng Talk for English speaking practice and more. 

“We will combine our experience of managing the existing products and LG’s technology to construct a hyper-customized education system,” a high level EBS official told The Korea Economic Daily.

Among LG affiliates, the AI research institute will develop an AI customer service representative for LG Uplus to preemptively manage potential complaints.

LG Chem, for its part, will work to advance its development of novel materials. 

“Members to the global alliance unanimously envision providing unprecedented customer service using hyperscale AI,” the head of LG AI Research Bae Kyung-hoon said. 

Write to See-eun Lee at see@hankyung.com
Jee Abbey Lee edited this article.