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| Kakao Brain CEO Kim Il-doo, left, poses with company employees, Friday. Courtesy of Kakao Brain |
By Baek Byung-yeul
Kakao has joined the boom of generative artificial intelligence (AI) services sparked by the explosive response to OpenAI's ChatGPT service, as its AI arm Kakao Brain will release the latest version of KoGPT, its own AI service, within the first half of this year, according to the company, Friday.
"Using AI technology we will lead people to a better life and continue to pursue our vision, which is to keep asking unthinkable questions," Kim Il-doo, CEO of Kakao Brain, said during an online event introducing its vision on Thursday night.
Kakao Brain was established in 2017 as Kakao forecast that businesses derived from AI would become its future growth engine.
As part of the vision, Kakao Brain will launch the upgraded generative AI service KoGPT, which will have strength in communicating with Korean language users. The company released a version of KoGPT in 2021 that was based on OpenAI's GPT-3 model, but the updated KoGPT will be based on GPT-3.5, the same version used by ChatGPT's service.
"The service is Kakao Brain's hyperscale AI language model that shows the results that users want by understanding Korean well in a dictionary or contextual sense," said Kim Kwang-seob, chief technology officer of Kakao Brain.
The move comes as U.S. company OpenAI has seen explosive responses around the world with its ChatGPT service, which was launched in November 2022. To keep up with fast-changing trends, Korean AI companies have announced they will release their own generative AI services, saying their products will understand the needs of Korean users better. Naver, Kakao's rival, already said it will also release its AI HyperCLOVA X in July and SearchGPT, an AI chatbot service, within the first half.
Kakao Brain added it will focus on developing AI-based image creation technology and healthcare technology.
Kakao Brain has launched Karlo, an AI-based image generator. The company said Karlo will be able to generate AI profiles within the first half of this year.
"Our goal is to release a research demonstration that can produce a draft version (medical report) after reading chest X-ray images," Bae Woong, chief healthcare officer of Kakao Brain, said while explaining plans for digital healthcare. "We are also considering expanding to include various modalities such as CT, MRI and ultrasound."
Kakao Brain is also working on developing AI-based new drug development technology. "Kakao Brain aims to improve people's health and happiness by simplifying the process of discovering new drug substances to two to three years from five to 10 years. By advancing our AI model, we will contribute to the development of reliable new drugs," the company said.
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