LG unveils multimodal AI EXAONE 2.0

Chief of LG AI Research Bae Kyung-hoon introduces its EXAONE 2.0 super-large multimodal AI at LG Science Park in southwestern Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

By Kim Jae-heun

LG Group has introduced EXAONE 2.0, its super-large multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) that can be used to help develop new materials and medicines, company officials said Wednesday.

The AI can think, learn and make decisions like a human based on its computing infrastructure capable of large-capacity calculations which enable it to learn large-scale data on its own, the officials said.

“LG is the only company in Korea that has commercialized both bilingual and bidirectional multimodal AI and developed the top 1 percent expert AI that understands and discovers knowledge of the world,” said Bae Kyung-hoon, Chief of LG AI Research.

It is an upgraded model of the previous multimodal AI EXAONE that LG first introduced in December 2021. The company has been improving it through continuous research and development.

EXAONE 2.0 studied about 45 million specialized documents and 350 million images, including patents and papers secured through partnerships.

Considering that much of the existing expertise data is in English, EXAONE 2.0 is developed as a bilingual model that can understand and answer both in Korean and English at the same time. It also learns over four times more data than the previous model.

To solve the high-cost issue of a super-large AI, the developers focused on lightening the weight of a large language model and multimodal model as well as investing considerable resources in optimized new technologies.

The LG AI researcher said that while maintaining the same performance of its language model as that of the previous version, EXAONE 2.0 has reduced inference processing time by 25 percent and cut memory usage by 70 percent ― saving overall costs by about 78 percent.

“We will develop into an AI company with global competitiveness that creates differentiated customer value from other generative AIs by working with domestic and foreign partners,” Bae said.