LG to invest $100m to build massive computer system for AI development

LG Group announced Monday that it plans to invest over $100 million over the next three years to develop high-performance computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence development.

LG Group’s AI research and development unit LG AI Research will build computing infrastructure with 600 billion machine learning parameters. The new computing system, capable of making 95.7 quadrillion calculations per second, will be introduced during the second half of the year and followed by an AI model with trillion-unit parameters in the first half of next year.

The number of parameters of the new AI system by the South Korean conglomerate is three times higher than that of GPT-3, which is currently the world’s largest autoregressive language model created by OpenAI.

Parameters work as synapses in the human brain that connects neurons to learn and store information. Larger number of parameters allow an AI model to achieve a certain level of accuracy faster than other AI models that use fewer parameters.

While GPT-3 uses deep learning to produce human-like text, LG’s new AI system can go a step further, not only using it to learn languages but also to understand images and videos, according to LG AI Research.

LG Group, together with 16 group affiliates, would utilize the new AI system in a wide range of business areas, according to the group’s AI unit.

That could include from handling customer services, to performing sales activities related to business-to-business customers, and in the manufacturing sectors as well, the company said.

It also plans to use its new AI system to collect and analyze massive amounts of studies and patents in the field of chemistry to construct a comprehensive database that the group chemical business can utilize to find new materials for battery and display products.

The development of vaccines and plastic products were also listed as fields that could potentially benefit from the new technology, the group noted.

LG Group will also develop an AI model that can work with product designers to shorten the design process by providing hundreds of design drafts to its in-house product designers, according to LG AI Research.

By Shim Woo-hyun (ws@heraldcorp.com)