Korean AI startup ActionPower poised to outdo OpenAI, Google: CEO

ActionPower Corp. founded in 2016 is small and young compared to Big Tech companies or heavily funded startups like OpenAI but it is mighty enough to surpass its formidable foreign peers, said its chief executive.

“We can beat Google, Microsoft and OpenAI,” Cho Hong-sik, founder and co-CEO of ActionPower, said in an interview with The Korea Economic Daily on Wednesday. “A startup with an AI service that is easy to use and can solve real problems for its users could overtake big tech firms.”

His confidence stems from ActionPower’s solid technology portfolio built on its original AI technology research and development competency.

It currently holds 21 local patents and two others registered abroad. They are all about AI-related technologies.

The company has been highly recognized for its original technologies at the world’s largest technical conference on speech processing and application INTERSPEECH, the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP) and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

A BIGGER DREAM AHEAD

It is more challenging for startups than already established big tech firms to develop original AI technologies like large language model (LLM) technology.

This is why many startups use existing AI technologies developed by household names like ChatGPT by OpenAI or Bard by Google to run their AI services.

“If we keep relying on ChatGPT, we will always lag ChatGPT,” said Lee Ji-hwa, co-CEO of ActionPower.

The two chiefs are confident that PowerAction’s own AI technology is on par with its globally renowned counterparts, and they are investing heavily in R&D and talent to stay ahead.

Of its total 50 staffers, more than 70% are developers, of which about 70% hold master’s or higher degrees.

The company has built its own know-how to deal with hallucinations created by generative AI-backed chatbots after it has operated Daglo, its AI-powered audio transcript service, for about five years, said Lee.

Daglo converts audio into searchable and editable transcripts and boasts about 95% accuracy in voice recognition, Lee added. Its subscribers, including both web and mobile users, reach about 300,000.

The company recently rolled out Daglo version 6.0, with more accurate voice recognition and a newly added note-taking service. It currently uses ChatGPT to enable its users to edit and summarize transcriptions.

“We plan to replace ChatGPT with our own proprietary LLM,” said Cho.

“We devote ourselves to the development of original technologies because we have a bigger dream,” said Lee.

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

Sookyung Seo edited this article.