Naver set to launch upgraded Hyper Clova AI model this year

Naver Corp.‘s large language model HyperCLOVA X logo [Courtesy of Naver]

Naver Corp. is planning to unveil its own large language model (LLM), HyperCLOVA X, at the end of July, according to Kim Yu-won, chief executive officer of Naver Cloud Corp.

LLM, which serves as the foundation for artificial intelligence services such as chatbots, will be a key player in the company’s battle for occupying the global AI ecosystem starting from the second half of this year, Kim told Maeil Business Newspaper in a recent interview.

HyperCLOVA X is an upgraded version of HyperCLOVA, a hyperscale Korean-language AI model that Naver released in May 2021, and it can understand both images and speech in a multimodal format.

“HyperCLOVA can be compared to a meat broth that can produce various dishes (services). Naver plans to provide business-to-business services that allow external companies to use AI functions based on their own internal data,” said Kim.

Developing and creating a large-scale AI model requires massive computing infrastructure. Companies with their own massive AI models are few and far between worldwide. Naver and Samsung Electronics Co. are currently developing smaller AI semiconductor solutions that are over four times more energy-efficient than conventional graphics processing units, which are primarily used for AI computation.

Kim said that even if an excellent performance AI model was developed, the operating cost during the commercialization stage could create a bottleneck. To address this, Naver is collaborating with Samsung Electronics to develop an AI chip that plays the role of the brain of a massive AI. The chip is expected to pass tests by the third quarter of this year, according to Kim.

Kim Yu-won, chief executive officer of Naver Cloud Corp. [Photo by Park Hyung-ki]

Multinational information technology companies such as Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Meta are currently engaged in an ecosystem war to attract more developers into their own system. OpenAI, for example, has released a chatbot GPT plugin that connects other applications.

Naver plans to unveil Search GPT, a chatbot AI service that incorporates chat GPT, similar to Microsoft’s Bing, in the first half of this year. Starting with this, HyperCLOVA X is expected to be applied to Naver’s core services such as search, shopping and collaboration tools, Kim said.

“AI technology will become the foundation of many industries and have a profound impact on the country’s production activities,” Kim said. “If we fall behind, we could see a repeat of the situation in the early days of smartphones when overseas companies monopolized the market and profits.”

This means that the recent AI technology revolution centered on U.S. big tech could be a major inflection point that could determine a country’s AI sovereignty.

“AI is not just a tool, but a technology that influences values, ethics and even national identity based on the data it learns,” Kim said, emphasizing that “South Korea is virtually the only country in the world besides the U.S. and China that can protect its AI sovereignty with technology.”

“The competition among big tech companies over generative AI technology is moving at an unprecedented pace and the battle for AI sovereignty must be won now,” Kim said.