Korea’s NAVER LABS to unveil robot with super-sized AI later this year

Seok Sang-ok, chief executive officer of NAVER LABS, right. [Photo by Kim Ho-young]

NAVER LABS Corp., the artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics research arm of South Korea’s platform giant Naver Corp., plans to unveil a robot equipped with a super-sized AI later this year.

The company aims to commercialize it three years later. As global big tech companies are rushing to converge massive AI and robotics one after another, Naver‘s strategy is seen as an attempt to preempt the market.

Seok Sang-ok, chief executive officer of NAVER LABS, told Maeil Business Newspaper that the company has been experimenting with integrating super-sized AI into various fields that require robots since two years ago.

“As early as the end of this year, some of the robots in Naver’s second headquarters 1784 will be operated based on this technology,” he said.

Unlike traditional robots that can only move in predefined areas, the robots equipped with super-sized AI can perform tasks without additional training. For example, a cooking robot can only cook a specific menu that it has been trained to cook, but in the near future, it will be able to cook everything with super-sized AI.

Due to this vast scalability, robotics industry insiders believe that super-sized AI robots will become a “game-changer.” If a robot is equipped with a super-sized AI with tens of billions of parameters, equivalent to the number of synapses in the human brain, the industrial landscape will change significantly, they predict.

To take the game-changing initiative, Google LLC last week demonstrated RT-2, a robot whose robotic arm picks up and moves objects with voice commands alone, and Microsoft Corp. is testing the integration of ChatGPT into robots.

Naver is expected to unveil its self-developed super-sized AI, HyperCLOVA X, on Aug. 24 and expand its commercialization area to autonomous driving by integrating it into robots. Seok explained that the super-sized AI robots have shown remarkable progress in exploring new paths and grasping objects, significantly reducing the time required for the robots to adapt to new environments.