Naver unveils first ‘hyperscale’ AI platform

South Korea’s IT giant Naver unveiled a supersized artificial intelligence platform on Tuesday that can process massive amounts of data, saying it aimed to lead the era of “hyperscale” AI.

Dubbed HyperCLOVA, the firm’s latest AI tool is not only the local industry’s most advanced but is also the first large-scale AI trained in the Korean language, Naver said.

“As a company that represents Korea’s artificial intelligence technology, we will find our way forward through various challenges and create a new era of artificial intelligence with many others,” said Jeong Seok-geun, who leads Naver’s AI research center, Naver CLOVA, at an online press conference.

Hyperscale AI, which is capable of analyzing and using massive datasets, can be used to develop new AI models.

At Tuesday’s event, Naver demonstrated various uses for HyperCLOVA. The AI tool could chat with humans, come up with product introductions from a few keywords, summarize complicated documents, and even select and organize the data needed to train another AI tool.

HyperCLOVA’s AI language tool has 204 billion parameters, more than San Francisco-based Open AI’s GPT-3, considered the most powerful AI language tool ever developed. The more parameters an AI language tool has, the more intricate and sophisticated it is.

Naver has already deployed HyperCLOVA for its portal site, adding a function early this month that allows it to automatically correct typos and recommend related search keywords.

The firm plans to add foreign languages, videos and images into HyperCLOVA’s neural network and to advance its machine learning capabilities. It also plans to actively work with businesses and researchers to diversify the AI tool’s uses.

The race to develop hyperscale AI is heating up among local companies.

Telecommunications provider SKT joined hands with Kakao in March and declared they were developing their own version of a hyperscale AI platform. LG Group announced last week that it would invest $1 million in hyperscale AI technology and come up with a prototype by the end of this year.

By Kang Jae-eun (kang.jaeeun@heraldcorp.com)