Kakao to unveil super-giant AI model later this year

Kakao Pangyo office in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. [Courtesy of Kakao]

South Korean platform giant Kakao Corp. will introduce KoGPT 2.0, an upgrade of its super-giant artificial intelligence (AI) model, later this year, and build a customized AI lineup optimized for each of its major services by capitalizing on external large language models (LLMs).

“We will unveil AI foundation models of various sizes with a good balance of performance and cost-effectiveness after October,” said Hong Eun-taek, chief executive officer of Kakao, during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Thursday.

“We will test models of various sizes, ranging from 6 billion to 13 billion, 25 billion, and 65 billion in parameters, to create AI that is cost effective,” he added.

In particular, Hong said that the company’s focus is to combine KakaoTalk and AI. It expects synergies in the area of communication with individual users and business partners.

For example, it will be possible to link AI with transactional services on KakaoTalk, such as those involving orders, booking, consultations, and payments.

“In the delivery, travel, and hospitality sectors, AI can be used to provide users with better choices and opportunities when they need support or consultation,” Hong said. “In the second half of the year, we will continue our efforts to combine AI with various vertical services within the community to deliver new user experiences while building foundation models with different sizes of parameters.”

KakaoTalk is likely to use a lightweight model with 6 billion parameters to provide a summary of messages.

Kakao sees that its AI investment will peak out in the second half of this year.

“Kakao Brain’s operating loss is expected to widen in the second half of the year as AI-related R&D personnel and infrastructure fees for building next-generation language models increase,” said Bae Jae-hyun, executive investment director at Kakao. “However, we plan to increase investment efficiency through internalization of investment costs by expanding the use of cloud infrastructure for AI learning and reasoning provided by Kakao Enterprise Corp.”

Bae also added that the company’s efforts to streamline corporate management will cut the losses from new initiatives, including those of Kakao Enterprise, Kakao Brain, and Kakao Healthcare Corp., to below 300 billion won ($231.2 million) that was announced earlier.

Kakao also plans to revamp KakaoTalk to increase the session duration of users and boost ad revenue.