South Korean tech large Kakao desires a bit of the motion within the generative AI race, and at the moment it made a bid for it, with large updates to its AI picture generator Karlo and its KoGPT massive language mannequin and a brand new fund to again AI picture producing startups.
Kakao’s AI division Kakao Brain‘s launch of Karlo 2.0 — an AI-powered software that may produce pictures from textual content prompts — allows customers to generate a picture in only a matter of seconds by inputting prompts in English or Korean.
KoGPT 2.0, in the meantime, isn’t resulting from be launched till Q3 2023 however it is going to be primarily based on GPT-3.5 and be educated on 30 billion completely different parameters.
Kakao Mind additionally has set up Karlo 100x, a ten billion received ($ 7.7 million) fund, Karlo 100X, to again AI startups that develop picture technology expertise.
Kakao’s releases underscore the stress that the corporate, like all incumbent tech gamers, has been going through to maintain up with the tempo of AI progress: newcomers like OpenAI, Midjourney, and extra have been making an enormous splash and controlling the narrative on the most important improvements of the second. For older corporations, the risk is at all times not simply that they received’t capitalize on no matter is coming subsequent, however they’ll begin to look previous and off.
Tellingly Karlo 2.0 is coming simply seven months after the corporate’s earlier replace (1.4). Kakao Mind beforehand launched a sophisticated text-to-image generator RQ-Transformer and minDALL-E on GitHub.
The corporate says Karlo 2.0 is educated on 300 million texts and pictures and helps a most decision of 2048×2048, leading to higher high quality and readability of pictures in numerous sizes and styles. It is a large advance on earlier editions of Karlo: the earlier model was educated on 180 million textual content and picture knowledge factors.
Karlo 2.0 may even be extra developer-friendly, with an publicly-available API for Kakao builders that provides them entry to creating 600,000 pictures per 30 days free of charge.
Its predecessor, additionally referred to as KoGPT, was initially rolled out in 2021 and trained on 200 billion tokens in on simply 6 billion parameters, utilizing Korean knowledge. The plan is now so as to add English, Japanese and different Asian languages, together with Bahasa Malaysia and Vietnamese. Kakao Mind is slated to launch KoGPT 2.0, which can be primarily based on GPT-3.5, with 30 billion parameters, aiming within the third quarter of 2023.
Picture Credit: Kakao Mind
Kakao’s strikes are attention-grabbing, however they aren’t coming in a vacuum and can face a variety of established competitors. Picture turbines are already out there from OpenAI (within the type of DALL-E), Midjourney and Stable Diffusion‘s Dream Studio. Simply final week, Chinese language tech behemoth Alibaba unveiled a generative AI-powered text-to-image model Tongyi Wanxiang for enterprise clients.
As with the corporate’s regionally-leading messaging app KakaoTalk, the opening for a corporation like Kakao appears to be to be a number one participant in AI pictures in its market, quite than aiming for world domination. Earlier this 12 months, Eun-Taek Hong, chief government officer of Kakao, mentioned in its earnings name that the Korean tech firm would supply generative AI companies. However quite than competing towards international friends within the area, Kakao would develop AI choices with a deal with the Korean language (for now), Hong mentioned.
It is going to be attention-grabbing additionally to see how and if Kakao builds this out in tandem with its different ambitions in AI. For instance, it’s making a foray into the healthcare business. The corporate is growing an AI-generative providing to investigate a medical picture and write a first-draft prognosis of a affected person’s chest X-ray for docs. It is usually growing AI expertise for drug discovery.
“We’re happy to introduce Karlo 2.0 via a technique of studying numerous picture knowledge and technological development, together with human proportions and composition, and perspective views that specific a way of area and three-dimensionality,” CEO of Kakao Mind mentioned Kim Ildoo in a press release. “We are going to use a wealth of knowledge and person suggestions to create photorealistic pictures whereas additionally growing a picture technology mannequin that may cater to a wider vary of person wants.”
Even regionally, there may be loads of competitors for Kakao, with different South Korean corporations aggressively growing their very own AI merchandise to jostle for a place within the generative AI area.
Naver is about to launch a generative AI service referred to as HyperCLOVA X and an AI chatbot SearchGPT subsequent month.
In December 2021, LG AI Research, an AI suppose tank unit of Korean tech agency LG, unveiled its AI-powered massive language mannequin referred to as Exaone with capabilities of 300 billion parameters. Most of LG’s subsidiaries, together with LG Electronics, LG Vitality Resolution, LG Uplus and LG Show, use Exaone. LG Electronics launched its personal AI Chatbot in Might within the wake of blocking the use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI.
And Samsung is reportedly developing a private generative AI tool for inner use solely after limiting generative AI instruments after delicate knowledge leakage.
SK Telecom, one among South Korea’s largest telco corporations, additionally added Chat GPT technology based on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI to its AI chatbot referred to as A. [A dot] Different two of Korea’s largest telco corporations, KT and LG’s Uplus, are growing AI chatbots primarily based on ChatGPT expertise, per native media shops.