LG

Expert AI Alliance, a super-giant AI alliance led by LG AI Research, was launched in a ceremonial event on February 22 with an ambitious vision together with a workshop. It is no exaggeration to say that the super-giant AI is attracting attention as the core AI technology in digital transition due to its excellent reasoning skill and huge potential. That is why a number of companies at home and abroad have begun developing super-giant AI last year. Now is the time to do research and verification on which area it may be applied. LG AI Research has undertaken this from a practical point of view faster than anyone.
 
The goal that LG AI Research wants to accomplish through super-giant AI technology is to nurture “Expert AI” in multiple domains. LG AI Research believes that an Expert AI that is capable of achieving a high customer satisfaction in collaboration with human experts can create a virtuous cycle of technological development and application. Although LG’s super-giant AI EXAONE, which was unveiled at the end of last year, definitely has great potential, it still has more things to learn to be named as “Expert AI.”
 
If it were to be compared to the stage of human learning development, EXAONE is a college student who has completed general elective courses. To become an expert in certain area, it requires an additional intensive training in that domain.
 
Based on this, LG AI Research suggested leading companies in various fields to form Expert AI Alliance together. The partner companies would become mentors who nurture expertise of EXAONE with skills/knowledge and data in the relevant field. LG AI Research will provide technological foundation for the partner companies to grow along with an EXAONE basic model.
 
The 13 Founding Members, Representative Companies of Each Industry
 
The 13 founding members of Expert AI Alliance include ▲LG AI Research ▲LG Electronics ▲LG Chem ▲LG Uplus ▲LG CNS ▲Woori Bank ▲Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) ▲Korea University Medicine ▲Hanyang University Seoul Hospital ▲VA Corporation ▲Elsevier ▲Shutterstock ▲Google. There are not just leading companies in the fields of finance, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecommunication, but also global top-tier companies: Elsevier, a global leading publisher in science and academic as well as R&D data and analytical service provider; Shutterstock, a multimedia content platform with the world’s largest image collection; and Google, a powerhouse which is by far the biggest global IT company with an ambition of dominating the deep learning cloud infrastructure.
 
Of all of those companies, nine companies including LG AI Research participated in the launching ceremony to announce their plan on development and application of Expert AI in an online workshop. In line with the theme of the workshop, “Journey to the Brand-New Customer Experience,” each of the participants had an opportunity to reveal what kind of innovation they would achieve using the super-giant AI and improve customer experience to the next level.
 
LG AI Research presented real cases and demonstrations of EXAONE to show what could be achieved by using EXAONE’s abilities. Recently, Tilda, the first AI human created using LG AI Research’s super-giant AI brain, has made a successful debut as an AI artist at New York Fashion Week, one of the largest fashion shows in the world. LG AI Research also outlined the technological backgrounds of Tilda with EXAONE. In addition, there was an introduction of several cases of AI application: AI converting the conversation of customer service into texts and summarizing the complex texts into key points in a few sentences and Expert AI extracting material information from the complicated chemical academic papers with a mixture of texts, figures (molecular structures), and tables.
 
LG AI Research also unveiled on the same day a detailed plan to provide an application programing interface (API), a means to easily access and utilize EXAONE. There will be a pre-release for the partner companies in the first half of this year of a total of 39 APIs in eight domains: ▲question-answering ▲text categorization ▲summarization ▲conversation ▲text generation ▲keyword extraction ▲image generation ▲image captioning. A service platform named “EXAONE Playground” will also be launched within this year so that people without coding expertise or non-AI developers can easily use the functions of EXAONE on the web. LG AI Research plans to continuously expand the scale and target of open API starting this year and lead the mainstream of the super-giant AI.
 
Many partner companies would be interested in creating an EXAONE model specialized for their tasks beyond simply using APIs. This will also be the main path for EXAONE to become an expert in a specific domain. LG AI Research introduced EXAONE Tuning Technique, the best solution to smoothly go through this process, after the Talk Concert held late last year. The scale of super-giant AI is so extensive that it requires much time and resources in additional training, which is why a lot of techniques such as lightweight tuning was developed to enable effective training. EXAONE tuning is much lighter than the well-known lightweight tuning techniques with the number of additionally trained parameters being only one-hundredth. It also showed excellent performance of reaching 370% compared to it in the KLUE DST Dataset Joint Goal Accuracy. This function will enable the partner companies to develop their own expert EXAONE quickly and effectively in various tasks. Through this process, the power of EXAONE will be amplified as well.
 
A few of intriguing points presented by each of eight partner companies at the workshop are as follows (in order of presentation at the workshop). For more details, you can check the YouTube video of presentation by each company’s executives.
 
LG Chem
 
The keys to LG Chem’s businesses lie in developing new substances and predicting their attributes. This is an arduous process that requires a lot of human and physical resources as well as a long time. It takes roughly a decade to develop a new drug. It is the basic research that takes up the largest part of the whole process. Basic research is a process of analyzing the information of related journals and patents at a time after it is planned to develop a certain substance. LG Chem plans to use the super-giant AI to innovate this process. In other words, the super-giant AI does research on behalf of human experts and organizes as well as provides information necessary to discover target substances. When this human and super-giant AI collaboration process is solidified, it will bring innovation to not just new drug development, but also new advanced material development and utilization of petrochemicals.
 
Elsevier
 
Elsevier is a leading Dutch academic publisher with a 140-year history of publication in science and medicine. The mission of the Life Science Department of Elsevier is to provide researchers with quick and easy access to documents containing the enormous amount of chemical data. Ultimately, they are committed to helping people discover the knowledge of materials that are useful to mankind in a timely manner. If LG EXAONE learns enriched knowledge of domains accumulated by Elsevier, Elsevier can create a higher level of an Expert AI model. The Expert AI will help researchers who are Elsevier's clients to create new, cheaper and greener composites. There may be a potential area in which LG Chem and Elsevier can cooperate with each other through a chain of EXAONE in the future.
 
LG Electronics
 
LG Electronics is preparing to be combined with the super-giant AI from the perspective of FUN customer experience. FUN is a philosophy to provide customers with a First, Unique and New experience. To fulfill this philosophy, the most important thing is to be able to listen carefully to the opinions of customers. There are an overflow of voices of customers through all sorts of channels including social media. To comprehend the data effectively in a timely manner, the help of the super-giant AI is crucial. The power of the super-giant AI needs to be further extended to go beyond previous data collection toward capturing of subtle emotions hidden in customer expressions. In addition, Byoung-hoon Kim, Chief Technology Officer of LG Electronics, presented an interesting use case of a fairy tale drawn by a parent and child with super-giant AI.
 
Woori Bank
 
Finance is one of the areas where the application of the super-giant AI technology is highly anticipated. In banks, customer contact points are rapidly transforming into mobile and digital areas. Woori Bank has a grand vision of developing a highly advanced AI banker that is capable of understanding customers’ intentions beyond a rigid customer service AI. How to take one step closer to this vision in collaboration with EXAONE was presented at the workshop.
 
Shutterstock (Research Partner)
 
Shutterstock based in New York plans to explore the potential of multi-modal capabilities of the super-giant AI as a joint research partner with LG AI Research. Shutterstock mainly operates a platform business that connects artists around the world with customers who want to purchase their creations including images. However, the company is also interested in artificial intelligence technology as it has recently acquired three AI-related companies. There are two areas of interest expressed by Shutterstock in using the super-giant AI: AI Captioning and AI Image Generation. Although Shutterstock is putting a lot of efforts to make image searching easier and more sophisticated for customers to find the image they are looking for, a more detailed search requires sufficiently descriptive image texts. EXAONE provides an AI captioning function that sees a picture and describes its details in natural language. EXAONE can also provide an image generation function that expresses customer’s description into a beautiful image.
 
LG Uplus
 
As a telecommunication company, LG Uplus is struggling to create an outstanding customer experience in areas of customer service and IPTV content service. The company is now seeking to bring things to the next level in such areas through collaboration with EXAONE. The ability of EXAONE to understand and generate language will be particularly prominent in these areas. What if AI could identify customer needs in the IPTV area and write an eye-catching introduction to content that targets the customers’ taste? Customers would find interesting content that they might otherwise have missed while the telecommunication company would be able to provide a more satisfying service. KB Gabe Hwang, CDO of LG Uplus, introduced compelling cases to show how EXAONE can be reborn as a AS expert and plays a critical role in AICC(AI Customer Center).
 
EBS
 
“Education” is a highly anticipated area for bringing change using AI. Educational Broadcasting System (EBS), the only educational public broadcaster in Korea, decided to cooperate with LG AI Research. The two companies will first apply AI technology to “mathematics” which is also the foundation of AI technology. Once becoming a hyper-personalized math teacher through collaboration, EXAONE would create questions according to the level of students and provide its solutions.
 
Google
 
Google has collaborated with LG AI Research from the learning process of EXAONE. In its presentation, Google calls EXAONE “a truly impressive AI system” that comprises an efficient architecture of a language model and a multi-modality structure of a vision model. Google discussed their role in Expert AI Alliance with hope that the collaboration between the two companies to the next level of the application of the super-giant AI. Google explained the details of collaborating project on Lingvo, and the assisting plan in software and hardware on NLP research. 
 
Virtuous Cycle of Expert AI Ecosystem
 
The success story of using EXAONE in one company will bring a new idea to another participating company. The partner companies are already finding lessons from each other through the use cases across industries presented in this workshop. All 13 starting members of Expert AI Alliance have the same dream to create unprecedented customer experience through the super-giant AI. The partner companies inspire each other within the Alliance. Throughout this process, the scope of which EXAONE express its abilities as a top expert will be expanded into various fields, providing opportunities for more partner companies to join the Alliance.
 
EXAONE will mark the beginning of Expert AI Alliance’s long journey. We ask for your continued interest and support.