Upstage’s AskUp offers Korea’s first GPT-4-powered chatbot service

Upstage, a South Korean AI tech startup, has unveiled a new version of its generative AI chatbot powered by GPT-4, to become the first to offer OpenAI’s latest large multimodal model-backed chatbot service in Korea, less than a week after GPT-4's global premiere.

Upstage announced on Friday that its chatbot AskUp is now fitted with GPT-4, an upgrade to the GPT-3.5 applied to OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, which has become a chatbot sensation across the world.

Thanks to GPT-4, combined with its proprietary optical character recognition technology, AskUp exhibits more advanced intelligence and can read and understand prompts better than before. In particular, its Korean-language proficiency has improved considerably with the upgrade, Upstage said.

The new AskUp, which is available as a KakaoTalk channel, can respond in 27 languages including Korean by tapping into a massive database collected from various fields including legal, medical and educational.

According to OpenAI, GPT-4 can create text not only from text input but also from images, and it is expected to carry out human-level performance, albeit not perfectly. It can now handle more than 25,000 words of text, eight times more than ChatGPT, and boasts more outstanding reasoning capabilities.

The Microsoft-backed AI startup claims GPT-4 produces less of an artificial hallucination effect, which gives wrong information, so people can confidently believe what the AI says. GPT-4 debuted on March 14.

A THREAT TO KOREAN CHATBOTS OF NAVER, KAKAO

Reflecting the ChatGPT fever, subscribers to AskUp neared 200,000 as of Friday morning, only two weeks since its debut.

Upstage CEO Seonghoon Kim said on Friday that the Korean AI company will continue to deepen its partnership with OpenAI to deliver better generative AI services, using GPT-4.

The foray of GPT-4 with its advanced Korean language skills into Korea poses a significant threat to major homegrown generative AI developers.

According to OpenAI, GPT-4 scored higher than its predecessor GPT-3.5 on English language capabilities, in tests carried out in 24 languages including Korean, Japanese and French.

This would pose a threat to Korea’s platform giants Naver Corp. and Kakao Corp., which have been going all-out to speed up the release of their own chatbots since the arrival of ChatGPT.

They have been confident that their chatbots would show better understanding in Korean than their US rival.

Naver plans to unveil HyperCLOVA X, an upgrade to its AI platform HyperCLOVA, in July. The newer version will better understand Korean text and give more accurate responses in Korean than ChatGPT does, the company said.

While expanding a hyperscale multimodal model ecosystem with HyperCLOVA X, the company will also focus on enhancing its competitiveness with a new search engine Search GPT, an AI-powered search chatbot.

Kakao also said its AI subsidiary Kakao Brain will expedite the development of its Korean language generative AI KoGPT, which is expected to outperform its rivals at understanding Korean prompts and carrying out tasks in Korean.

Write to Jong-Woo Kim at jongwoo@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.