Lee Gyu-lee is a business writer at The Korea Times, focusing primarily on IT & telecommunications, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and KOTRA. Prior to this, she has covered a wide range of cultural news, from film, television and K-pop to lifestyle and fashion.
LG AI Research showcases real-world EXAONE AI applications at ICML 2026
Lim Woo-hyung, left, head of LG AI Research, examines the company's booth at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026 at Coex in Seoul, Tuesday. Courtesy of LG AI Research.
By Lee Gyu-lee
LG AI Research is showcasing a series of industrial artificial intelligence (AI) applications powered by its large language model (LLM) EXAONE at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026, underscoring its push to use advanced AI for real-world commercial solutions.
The conference, taking place at Coex in southeastern Seoul from Monday through Friday, is being held in Korea for the first time. It is widely regarded as one of the world's top three AI and machine learning research forums.
For the event, the company highlights the real-world deployment of its LLM across materials science, finance and data infrastructure, including EXAONE Discovery, an AI platform designed to accelerate new materials and drug development.
EXAONE Discovery, built on the company’s AI co-scientist technology, reads unstructured scientific papers, extracts molecular structures and proposes new candidate compounds in response to researchers’ queries.
LG AI Research secured patents covering this end‑to‑end AI‑driven discovery workflow earlier this year and has since applied it in research across cosmetic formulations, battery and semiconductor materials and new drug candidates.
The company showcases two materials identified with AI assistance: Rhamsydil, a new hair-loss care ingredient, and an immersion cooling fluid designed for AI data centers.
Rhamsydil was discovered after EXAONE Discovery screened more than 420,000 candidate compounds in a single day, according to the company. The ingredient has shown hair-loss prevention effects without steroid-derived compounds and is now being prepared for commercialization.
“EXAONE has already reached a stage where it is delivering tangible results in real industrial settings,” an LG AI Research official said. “LG AI Research plans to keep identifying new areas where AI can be used to solve complex industrial challenges.”
The company also demonstrates EXAONE Business Intelligence, a financial AI agent that analyzes roughly 8,000 listed companies in Korea and the United States every day, generating predictive scores and analyst-style commentary to support investment decisions.
Following a launch with the London Stock Exchange Group earlier this year, the company recently signed an agreement with Korea Securities Computing Corp. to expand into the domestic market.
It also introduces EXAONE Data Foundry, a platform that automatically generates high-quality datasets and builds domain-specific AI models.
The company said the system improves data productivity by more than 1,000 times while increasing data quality by an average of over 20 percent. In a pilot with the National Pension Service, the platform generated more than 10,000 specialized data entries per day.
Separately, LG AI Research is presenting 14 research papers at the conference. Its AI model for materials generation ranked second globally on the LeMat-GenBench benchmark, which evaluates AI systems’ ability to generate stable and novel crystalline materials.