Samsung, Naver to jointly develop generative AI to rival ChatGPT

South Korea’s two tech giants – Samsung Electronics Co. and Naver Corp. – have agreed to jointly develop a generative artificial intelligence platform for corporate users to compete with global AI tools such as ChatGPT.

Under their AI partnership, Naver, the country’s top online and search engine operator, will receive data related to semiconductors from Samsung to create a generative AI, which will then be further enhanced by Samsung.

Once developed, the AI tool, available in Korean, will be used by Samsung’s Device Solutions (DS) division, which includes its semiconductor business, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

The two partners aim to unveil the AI tool as early as October, sources said.

After field tests, Samsung plans to widen the use of the enterprise generative AI tool to other businesses within the company, including the Device eXperience (DX) division, which oversees the company’s smartphone and home appliance businesses, one of the people said.

Through the collaboration, Samsung will secure an in-house AI tool that can improve the company’s productivity while preventing the potential leak of sensitive business secrets that could occur using platforms developed by other companies.

Naver, for its part, will enhance its chances of successfully entering the global enterprise AI market, sources said.

TAILORED TO KOREAN SERVICES

One of the key strengths of the Samsung-Naver AI chatbot is that the tool is available in Korean.

Naver Cloud, the artificial intelligence unit of Naver Corp., said in February it will launch a new hyper-scale AI platform, HyperCLOVA X, an upgrade to its earlier version of HyperCLOVA, in July with a view to creating an AI ecosystem tailored to Korean services.

Naver said HyperCLOVA X, which learned 6,500 times more Korean words than ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, will better understand and more accurately respond to prompts in Korean than English-based tools.

Kyung Kye-hyun, president and chief of Samsung’s semiconductor business, recently said via his social network services that “AI data are processed largely in English in advanced countries. Non-English-speaking countries such as Korea are being marginalized in utilizing generative AI tools.”

Naver Chief Executive Choi Soo-yeon has also said one of the company’s major business goals is to provide customer-centric services that better address problems facing Korean enterprises.

In early February, Naver said it will unveil a beta version of its AI-powered search engine, SearchGPT, in the first half of this year.

Naver plans to make its corporate-use generative AI tools available worldwide by combining its existing collaborative business services including LINE WORKS and NAVER WORKS with HyberCLOVA X by the end of this year.

JOINT WORK ON AI CHIPS

Samsung and Naver also plan to unveil AI chips in the second half of this year to compete with the likes of Nvidia Corp.’s graphics processing unit (GPU), which powers AI platforms.

In December, the two Korean companies said they’re working on next-generation AI chips optimized for hyper-scale AI platforms.

When developed, the AI chips will replace the Nvidia chips currently used in Naver’s AI platforms.

According to market researcher Gartner, the global AI chip market is forecast to grow to $70 billion by 2025 from $23 billion in 2020.

Samsung’s move to develop an in-house AI chatbot comes months after one of its engineers accidentally leaked internal source code, a business secret, by uploading it on ChatGPT to check it for technical errors.

Earlier this month, Samsung said it is banning its DX division employees from using ChatGPT, Google Bard, Bing AI chatbot and other generative AI tools on their desktop computers, tablets and smartphones at their workplace.

Samsung, the world’s largest memory chip and smartphone maker, is the latest big Korean company to publicly express concerns about the use of generative AI tools and privacy fears.

In Korea, SK Hynix Inc., the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker, and POSCO Holdings Inc., Korea’s top steelmaker, have already banned their employees from using generative AI chatbots at work.

Some Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., have either banned or restricted the use of ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong and Jeong-Soo Hwang at jeong@hankyung.com

In-Soo Nam edited this article.