LG Elec, Upstage to form partnership for on-device AI

South Korea’s artificial intelligence startup Upstage said on Tuesday it has signed a memorandum of understanding with LG Electronics Inc. to develop small language model (SLM)-based on-device AI technology to fit into LG’s laptops and home appliances.

On-device AI processes data in smartphones, laptops and tablets without internet connectivity at a faster speed than cloud-based AI and consumes less power. It also has enhanced data security without personal information leakage.

In December last year, the AI startup unveiled Solar, a new 10.7-billion-parameter English language model, the first of its kind in the world. It is an advanced pretrained generative text model.

Upon its debut, Solar secured the top position on Huggingface Open LLM Leaderboard, a global AI platform, beating Meta, Alibaba, 01.AI and Mistral AI.

In the first two weeks of its launch, all LLMs based on Solar took the top 20 spots on the leaderboard.

Solar is an acronym for Specialized and Optimized LLM and Applications with Reliability.

It is less than one-tenth of a GPT-3, a very large language model, in parameter and features a much faster inference speed, allowing it to provide various language-related AI services without affecting the performance and power consumption of the device. It is regarded as an optimal on-device AI.

Upstage and LG will collaborate to develop AI technology to recognize users' voice commands and translate, summarize, search and recommend documents or web pages.

“We will first apply the highest-performance AI to LG gram laptops with cumulative sales of 2 million units and do our best to ensure LG customers can experience AI features in LG Electronics home appliances,” Choi Hong-joon, vice president of Upstage, said in a statement.

Upstage Chief Executive Sung Kim is a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and led Naver Clova AI Research.

He co-founded Upstage in 2020 with other AI experts from Nvidia, eBay, Naver Corp. and Kakao Corp., as well as professors from New York University and HKUST.

Naver is South Korea’s largest online portal and Kakao is the mobile giant in the country.

At CEO 2024 last month, LG Electronics CEO Cho Joo-wan defined AI as affectionate intelligence and emphasized that responsible intelligence was one of its characteristics to protect user data and enhance access safety.

Write to Chae-Yeon Kim at Why29@hankyung.com
 

Yeonhee Kim edited this article.