S.Korea’s Liner, the world’s No. 4 generative AI web product

South Korea’s home-grown artificial intelligence service Liner was ranked the world’s fourth-most popular generative AI web product as the productivity tool has attracted global users such as executives of major companies such as Netflix Inc.

Liner took fourth place in the list of the top 50 generative AI web products by unique monthly visits, according to a report issued by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz on March 13.

ChatGPT developed by Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI topped the list with 2 billion web visits, followed by Google’s Gemini, formerly Bard, and Character Technologies Inc.’s character.ai.

AI services by South Korean tech giants such as Naver Corp. and Kakao Corp. were not on the list. Upstage Co., a South Korean AI startup that topped the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard, a standard for open-source large language model evaluation of over 500 LLM, failed to enter Andreessen Horowitz’s top 50 list. Another AI portal startup Wrtn Technologies Inc., which has a strong customer base in the country, did not make it, either.

Andreessen Horowitz said over 40% of the companies on the list are new, compared to its initial September 2023 report.

“Among the so-called newcomers, those highest ranked include Liner, an AI research copilot,” it said in the report.

CHOICE OF GLOBAL MAJOR COMPANIES

Liner allowed users to save information on the web or document files such as PDFs by highlighting with a mouse when it was introduced in 2015. The service was famous among office workers with the nickname of a computer monitor highlighter pen.

Its developer Liner Inc. expanded the service with AI technology to launch Liner AI Workspace, a work assistance system, and Liner AI Copilot, a web browser tool.

The strategy boosted the number of users. Liner attracted more than 65 million visitors in January, of which more than 90% are in other countries.

Employees and executives of major global companies such as Netflix, the world’s top streaming service, and Pixar Animation Studios, a US  computer-animated feature film producer, were known to frequently use Liner, according to industry sources in Seoul.

Liner AI Workspace provides accurate sources of information as it is hard for users to fully rely on ChatGPT due to hallucinations -- responses generated by the chatbot, which contain false or misleading information presented as fact.

Liner AI Workspace also offers customized information to users. It mostly provides medical information if a user frequently searches medical terms and saves related data, for example.

Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com
 
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.