Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light, though wise men at their end know dark is right, because their words had forked no lightning they, do not go gentle into that good night.
LG holds AI hackathon to cultivate next generation of tech talent
Participants of the LG Aimers Hackathon pose during the event at LG Inhwawon training center in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, Sunday. Courtesy of LG Group
By Jhoo Dong-chan
LG held a two-day hackathon event, drawing 94 young participants to develop optimized versions of the company’s EXAONE large language model as part of its broader push into advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The event, “LG Aimers Hackathon,” was held at LG Inhwawon training center in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, over the weekend and was part of LG Aimers, the group’s flagship youth AI talent development initiative. Since its launch in the second half of 2022, the program has trained more than 20,000 young people and become Korea’s largest youth AI education effort.
LG said it aims to develop a cumulative total of at least 50,000 young AI professionals by 2030.
The 94 participants were chosen from 2,339 applicants, having advanced through online coursework and a qualifying round. They were tasked to develop lightweight versions of EXAONE, a large language model developed by LG AI Research.
LLM lightweighting is an optimization technique that reduces model size and improves inference speed while preserving performance and accuracy — a key technology for running AI models independently on individual devices such as laptops and smartphones.
The participants produced a total of 27 lightweight EXAONE models. LG said it plans to publish models that pass performance evaluation on Hugging Face, a global open-source AI platform, so that developers worldwide can use them.
LG awarded a total of 10 million won in prize money to the top three teams, based on model performance, code evaluation and oral presentation. The winning teams will also receive an exemption from the document screening stage when applying for positions at LG.
The grand prize, the Minister of Employment and Labor Award, went to Park Seo-hui, Jo Ha-yeong and Son Min-ju.
On the second day, eight major LG affiliates — including LG AI Research, LG Electronics, LG Display, LG Innotek, LG Energy Solution, LG H&H, LG U+ and LG CNS — held a recruitment fair for participants, offering career counseling, priority consideration for LG's AI talent pool registration, one-on-one consulting with recruitment specialists and mock AI interview sessions. All program content, from graduate-level AI coursework to recruitment support, was provided free of charge.
LG Aimers is open to applicants between the ages of 19 and 29 with foundational AI knowledge and coding skills, and runs twice a year during summer and winter breaks.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.