Naver pins AI hopes on Korea-specific services

Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon introduces the company's AI services at a conference held at Grand InterContinental Seoul in southern Seoul on Thursday. [NAVER]

Naver, Korea’s largest internet portal, introduced its answer to ChatGPT on Thursday, hoping that AI services based on its own large language model (LLM) trained in Korean could provide more tailored interactions than competitors.

The performance of the new services will determine its competence in the global race for AI supremacy, though the Seongnam, Gyeonggi-based company is lagging behind in terms of the speed of its release.

Its generative AI services come in two prongs: Clova X, a standalone, ChatGPT-like chatbot whose beta version was made available Thursday and Cue:, a search-oriented AI integrated into the Naver portal due to be released in September.

Both of them are built upon Naver’s latest LLM dubbed HyperClova X.

Asked how it can compete with bigger players like the Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google, the CEO of Naver cited the vast array of data from its functions ranging from shopping, reservation, review and its map.

“So far, Naver has integrated AI-powered technologies into search, shopping, reservation, review, user-generated content, map and video to improve and refine AI capabilities and usability,” said Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon during a press conference on Thursday.

“Our decades-long understanding, know-how and technologies will serve as a backbone for the competitiveness of HyperClova X,” she said.

Despite the bold statements, Naver refrained from demonstrating its set of services in real-time — unlike what Google and OpenAI did for Bard and the GPT series — and instead featured prearranged images and videos to show the prompts and answers.

Clova X was shown to process the prompt “Rent a car suitable for driving with children on Jeju Island.”

It came up with a list of three cars and direct buttons that lead to the reservation, a service that it collaborated on with car rental start-up Socar.

Naver partnered with other third-party app providers like Baedal Minjok for food delivery and Yanolja on accommodation for its generative AI services.

Alongside interest-based answers, the Clova X is also designed to cater to enterprise clients by generating code, charts and different types of reports.

Sung Na-ko, head of the HyperScale AI division at Naver, said that start-ups operating in Korea are targets of the new service.

“I had a chat with people from local start-ups and asked about the difference between OpenAI’s offering and ours,” he said.

“OpenAI pulls together data scattered across the globe, but assume that the query is related to a recommendation for a cafe near Sangam-dong in Seoul and their answer might not be as accurate as users want it to be. But we trained the AI systems in the context of Korea, so their understanding of Korean is right on the mark,” Sung said.

As for Cue:, Naver focused on lowering error rates given that it is shown as a search result. Cue: can deploy more up-to-date information and compare its own information with the data from the internet to check accuracy.

In order for the company to stay ahead in the AI race, the CEO stressed the need to scale up server storage and chips powering the training.

Naver plans to complete its new data center in Sejong by November.

The company is also working with Samsung Electronics to develop AI-training chips, but the collaboration has yet to bear fruit, according to the CEO.

BY PARK EUN-JEE [park.eunjee@joongang.co.kr]