Naver Corp., whose Line messaging app and search engine dominate Japan and Korea’s internet landscapes, will unfurl its own answer to ChatGPT this week as it joins a race to tap potentially transformative AI technology.
The company will take the lid off several generative AI services it’s been working on at a conference in Seoul Thursday. They include Cue, to be plugged into its search engine, a chatbot CLOVA X and other services for enterprise users, Chief Executive Officer Choi Soo-yeon said in a letter to shareholders published Monday.
Naver’s services, based on its HyperCLOVA X model, will go up against a plethora of AI platforms unfurled in recent months by global technology leaders from OpenAI to Google and China’s Baidu Inc. Since OpenAI’s seminal ChatGPT demonstrated the technology’s potential in November, corporations and entrepreneurs from the US to China have scrambled to develop services that can generate original stories, art and video from a few user commands.
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Naver’s services mark the first entries in that race from Korea, one of the world’s most connected and fast-growing internet and mobile arenas. As with other generative AI platforms, Naver has been training its products on data from an array of services. It’s one of just five companies known to have developed its own large language model with more than 100 billion parameters, according to the CEO, comparable to ChatGPT.
The AI effort comes as Naver seeks to safeguard its lead in Asia against rivals such as Alphabet Inc. The company has faced numerous existential threats from global companies with massive capital and resources, but it has weathered those crises by innovating and seizing new opportunities, Lee said in the letter.
“We are ready to face the new change called AI and are confident that Naver will strengthen its competitive position,” Choi wrote.
