Upstage to create interactive chatbot for virtual idols

South Korea’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup Upstage announced on Thursday that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Metaverse Entertainment, a subsidiary of Netmarble Corp., for the joint development of Persona AI.

Upstage will work on giving personality to chatbots, allowing them to engage in conversations like real individuals with the four-member virtual human idol group MAVE: developed by Metaverse Entertainment.

The company plans to leverage its own model called SOLAR, which achieved the top ranking in the evaluation of the "HuggingFace" machine learning platform's giant language model (LLM), and its AI chatbot "AskUp," which has 1.45 million users.

Upstage explained that it will implement unique conversational styles for MAVE: members, reflecting factors such as their MBTI personality test results.

"In the future, based on the giant language model SOLAR, we will lead AI innovation in various content areas, including entertainment and games," CEO of Upstage Kim Seong-hoon said. 

Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com