Kakao to unveil upgraded Korean language chatbot KoGPT in H2

Kakao Corp., South Korea’s dominant mobile messaging app operator, has pushed back the release of an advanced artificial intelligence model customized for the Korean language, KoGPT 2.0, to the second half of this year, its Chief Executive Hong Euntaek said on Thursday.

The upgraded version of KoGPT was developed by Kakao Brain Corp. and was slated to be unveiled in the first half of this year.

Hong’s remarks, made on an earnings call, come as the country’s largest mobile platform is gearing up to boost music streaming services after purchasing a 40.3% stake in K-pop pioneer SM Entertainment Co. in March.

KoGPT is a super AI conversation app, based on OpenAI’s GPT-3. Kakao claims it is the most powerful Korean language chatbot, trained primarily on Korean text.

During the next few months, Kakao Brain will continue to test KoGPT 2.0’s processing capabilities and train it with high-level Korean phrases.

By all standards, KoGPT 2.0 appears to lag the generative AI model ChatGPT, which AI industry experts fear may outsmart humans.

But it will be competitive enough to serve as a Korean language chat interface, Hong noted.

KoGPT is short for Korean Generative Pre-trained Transformer.

To continue to upgrade KoGPT, Kakao may embrace other language processing technologies such as Google’s AI model LaMDA, the CEO told the conference call.

Venturing into the medical service field, Kakao Brain will unveil an advanced version of its image-generating foundation AI “Karlo” within the month. It can generate high-quality images from text descriptions.

It is also slated to launch the demonstration service of an AI tool that can write the first draft diagnosis of chest radiography, or a chest X-ray, in the third quarter of this year.

Touching on the AI industry outlook, Kakao CEO Hong said the AI market would be divided by multiple players, rather than being controlled by a dominant company.

EARNINGS

Kakao Corp. Chief Investment Officer Bae Jaehyun said the company could post operating losses of as much as 300 billion won ($230 million) for all of this year on the back of aggressive investment in AI-based cloud services.

To slash costs, it is shutting down uncompetitive and inefficient businesses.

“Kakao Healthcare and Kakao Brain are releasing commercial services,” Bae said. “We will be able to reduce the size of losses substantially from next year.”

Kakao will consolidate its financial results with those of SM Entertainment from the current quarter.

In the first quarter, its operating profit and revenue remained steady at 129.4 billion won and 640.7 billion won respectively, compared to the year-earlier period.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com

Yeonhee Kim edited this article.