Does Google Bard in Korean pose any risk to Naver, Kakao?

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – Global tech giant Google on Wednesday unveiled an upgraded version of Bard, its generative artificial intelligence chatbot, with availability in Korean, but the move is unlikely to threaten Naver Corp. and Kakao Corp., the Asian country’s leading online companies set to introduce their own chatbots specializing in the language.

The unit of US Alphabet Inc. said users can immediately use Bard in Korean and Japanese while expanding access to Bard in English in over 180 countries at Google I/O, its annual developer conference in Mountain View, California.

Bard was more fluent in Korean than the global hit ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI based on generative AI technology. The Google chatbot’s Korean was not as awkward as the word-by-word translations of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT has already been providing services in the language for months. English reportedly accounted for about 97% of ChatGPT’s total data learning while Korean made up only 0.02%, according to industry sources in Seoul.

South Korean companies plan to introduce advanced AI chatbots customized for the Korean language.

Naver, the country’s top online service provider, is set to launch in July HyperCLOVA X, which it said better understands and more accurately responds to prompts in Korean than ChatGPT. Kakao, the nation’s dominant mobile messaging app operator, plans to unveil KoGPT 2.0 in the second half.

“ChatGPT and Bard do not seem to be excellent in Korean,” said an information technology industry source in Seoul. “Naver, Kakao and other domestic companies will be able to beat them, given their abundant learning skills in Korean.”

Reflecting such optimism, stocks of Naver and Kakao ended up 1.2% and 1.1%, respectively, on Friday in the South Korean stock market, although the wider Kospi fell 0.6%.

WHY KOREAN AND JAPANESE, NOT CHINESE OR SPANISH?

Google chose Korean and Japanese for the first non-English Bard version as they are helpful in developing services in other languages, its CEO Sundar Pichai said on Thursday.

“It helps us to do something very different from English so that you get the entire range of false we need to think about and it makes other languages easier,” Pichai told reporters.

Korean and Japanese provide environments for safe research in large language model development, he added.

The company is on track to make Bard available in the 40 most spoken languages by the end of the year.

South Korea and Japan are actively developing new technology, Pichai said.

“They're incredibly dynamic and exciting regions, which are at the cutting edge of an opting technology,” said Pichai, adding the mobile sector in the two countries is ahead of the West.

“There's some value in being in these markets which are cutting edge.”

BARD IS BETTER THAN CHATGPT ABOUT KOREA

Bard performed better than ChatGPT about South Korea.

The Google AI chatbot answered Yoon Suk Yeol when asked who the current South Korean President is, providing additional information such as how much support he earned during the election and when he took office.

On the other hand, ChatGPT said the South Korean President was Moon Jae-in as of September 2021, adding it needs to check the latest information since the country would have a new president on May 11, 2023. That came as a free version of ChatGPT has information updated only until 2021 with the paid one providing the latest information. Bard offers such data for free.

“Bard can learn the latest information and answer it. Bard also seems to be a bit faster than ChatGPT,” said an AI developer in Seoul.

Both Bard and ChatGPT said Dokdo is the territory of South Korea when asked which country the group of islets in the East Sea between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago belong to.

But their explanations were slightly different. Bard said the Liancourt Rocks were internationally recognized as South Korean territory but Japan continues to claim groundlessly its sovereignty. ChatGPT said Dokdo is known as a territory of disputes between the two countries as Japan also claims sovereignty, adding there are differences in understanding.

When asked about the schedule of the Group of Seven Summit this year, neither provided a correct answer. ChatGPT said it did not know it since it has not learned the latest information, while Bard initially said the meeting will be held in Hokkaido, Japan from May 26 to May 28, 2023. The leaders from the world’s most powerful countries will meet in Hiroshima, Japan from May 19 to May 21, 2023. 

Write to Ki-Yeol Seo and Jin-Suk Choi at philos@hankyung.com
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.