Upstage installs Solar in KakaoTalk AI services

South Korea’s artificial intelligence (AI) tech startup Upstage announced on Thursday that its small language model (SLM) Specialized and Optimized Language Model and Applications with Reliability (Solar) is installed in KakaoTalk’s AI chatbot AskUP.

AskUp is the AI chatbot service of South Korea’s largest chat app. It has 1.65 million users. It empowers users with diverse AI features beyond simple chatbot interactions. It generates images, performs accurate optical character recognition (OCR), and more.

Solar is an SLM with 10.7 billion parameters that Upstage released in December last year. It uses a limited number of parameters compared to existing large language models (LLMs) that help to reduce hallucinations and other problems.

Upstage has currently implemented Solar in 10% of conversations in AskUp. The company plans to expand its use to a higher percentage in the future.

Write to Kang-Ho Jang at callme@hankyung.com