S.Korea's Elice, FuriosaAI to develop training for AI semiconductor talent

South Korea's artificial intelligence (AI) digital education provider Elice on Tuesday said it signed a memorandum of understanding with the AI semiconductor company FuriosaAI Inc. on business cooperation in such chips. 

Through this agreement, both companies will cooperate in pursuing projects to expand and improve utilization of FuriosaAI's chips, promote such semiconductors' proof of concept and plan training to develop specialists in AI chip design.

Specifically, the plan is to apply to and verify FuriosaAI's neural processing unit in Elice's generative pre-trained transformer-based AI tutorial service and AI data center provided as infrastructure as a service, or IaaS. 

Launched in 2015 by Ph.D. students from the AI lab of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Elice provides a digital education practice platform that offers customized education to some 1,000 institutions like 18 companies like those of conglomerates SK, LG, Hyundai Motor and CJ and universities, governments and public institutions.

Beyond corporate education, the company has expanded its services to coding tests and cloud in emerging as a specialist in digital transformation.

FuriosaAI was founded in 2017 by its CEO June Paik, a former semiconductor design engineer at Samsung Electronics Co., and chip engineers from big tech giants like Google and Amazon. At the time of launch, FuriosaAI received investment from D2SF, a startup investment organization of South Korea's top web portal Naver Corp.

"With the rapid rise of AI technology, we must now build related infrastructure and develop talented personnel,” Elice CEO Kim Jae-won said. “We will contribute to the growth of the country's AI semiconductor talent."

“We will strive to foster AI talent and develop into a competitive AI semiconductor company on the global market,” FuriosaAI CEO June Paik added.

Write to Da Eun Choi at max@hankyung.com