LG unveils Korea’s 1st open-source AI EXAONE 3.0

LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo, right, poses with Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent which designs semiconductors for artificial intelligence services, during their meeting in Silicon Valley, Calif., June 23. Courtesy of LG Corp.

LG Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research announced, Wednesday, the release of its latest AI model, EXAONE 3.0, as an open-source resource for research purposes. This marks the first time a Korean company has launched an open-source AI system, enabling developers to use the model without needing to obtain permission.

The company also introduced the open beta version of ChatEXAONE, an enterprise AI agent based on EXAONE 3.0, for LG Group employees. This tool is designed to assist them with their daily work tasks.

Logo of EXAONE/ courtesy of LG Group

According to the group, LG AI Research has published a technical report detailing the model training methods and performance evaluation results of EXAONE 3.0. The latest model demonstrates superior performance and cost-efficiency compared to its predecessors, EXAONE 1.0, released in December 2021, and EXAONE 2.0, released in July 2023.

Compared to EXAONE 2.0, EXAONE 3.0 required 56 percent less processing time for inference, 35 percent less memory usage and 72 percent lower operating costs.

The technical report showed that EXAONE 3.0 ranked top in 13 benchmark scores, including real-world use cases, coding and math, demonstrating its global competitiveness when compared to other global open-source AI models of a similar size, such as Meta's Llama 3.1 and Google's Gemma 2.

As a bilingual model capable of learning and understanding both Korean and English, EXAONE 3.0 has also received high praise for its performance in Korean.

To enhance the performance of EXAONE 3.0, LG AI Research utilized over 60 million data sets from patents, software code, mathematics, chemistry, and other specialized fields for training. The company plans for EXAONE to learn from more than 100 million data sets in fields such as law, biology, medicine, education, and various languages by the end of the year.

This chart from LG Group compares the overall performance of EXAONE 3.0 with other open-source AI models. Courtesy of LG Group

In the second half of the year, LG AI Research plans to collaborate with LG affiliates to integrate EXAONE 3.0 into various products and services. Depending on its intended use, EXAONE will be available in different model sizes, ranging from an ultra-lightweight version for on-device AI services to a high-performance model for specialized applications.

Along with EXAONE 3.0, LG announced the launch of the open beta service for ChatEXAONE, which is available to LG Group employees.

Based on EXAONE 3.0, ChatEXAONE provides a variety of functions to enhance work productivity, including real-time web-based Q&A, document and image-based Q&A, coding support and database management.

LG AI Research will offer an open beta service through the end of the year, with regular updates based on employee feedback and suggestions. The official service and mobile app will be rolled out according to the readiness of each LG affiliate.

“As it is important to create AI that can be used in real-world industries, we plan to strengthen partnerships between LG affiliates and other companies and institutions with EXAONE,” LG AI Research President Bae Kyung-hoon said.

“In particular, we plan to release the lightweight model as open-source, allowing research institutes to access and utilize our generative AI model, thereby contributing to the AI research ecosystem.”