Sharing Memories... SKT Equips A. Dot with 'Long-term Memory'

Remembering Favorite Movies and Pets from Past Conversations
Advanced Multimodal Understanding Including Photos and Voice

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Hye-seon] SK Telecom announced on the 24th that it will equip its growth-type artificial intelligence (AI) service A-dot with multimodal services next month to begin full-scale service advancement. Multimodal is a service that can utilize ‘long-term memory’ technology to remember old information and apply it in conversations, and can understand complex information such as photos and text together.

Based on its advanced technology that first commercialized the Korean GPT-3 service in the world, SK Telecom plans to focus on research and development (R&D) investment, including integrating ultra-large AI models like ChatGPT.

Remembering Favorite Movies, MBTI Types, and Pets

SKT plans to apply ‘long-term memory’ technology to A-dot, which stores important information from users’ past conversations in a separate memory and utilizes it during conversations, similar to how humans retrieve old memories from the brain.

The information includes various details such as what the user likes and dislikes, occupation, hobbies, MBTI type, and pets. For example, if a user says to A-dot, “I took the subway after a long time, but transferring was annoying,” A-dot will respond, “You usually preferred taking taxis,” recalling the user’s past conversations with A-dot.

SKT will also apply multimodal technology that allows A-dot to show related photos while continuing conversations on topics like skiing, advancing the level of dialogue.

While existing ultra-large AI models mainly focus on language, multimodal AI is a technology that can comprehensively reason and communicate like humans using various types of data such as text, voice, images, gestures, and biometric signals.

Integration of ChatGPT and R&D Investment in GPT-4

Following the launch of A-dot, the first commercialized Korean version of the ultra-large language model GPT-3 in Korea, SKT is advancing the service based on this. At the same time, it is strengthening the internalization of ‘AI pursuit values’ that enhance AI ethics awareness and compliance obligations.

GPT-3 has the advantage of expanding the scale of the AI model compared to the previously released GPT-2 model, enabling it to be used as if naturally conversing with a human.

SKT plans to integrate ultra-large AI models like ChatGPT into A-dot. Currently, AI conversation services are largely composed of ‘purpose-driven conversations’ focused on commands, ‘emotional conversations’ that can chat casually like friends, and ‘knowledge conversations’ used to acquire information. When linked with ChatGPT, knowledge conversations can be significantly enhanced by utilizing the vast information ChatGPT possesses.

Since 2017, SKT has internalized AI technology and commercially applied it to services such as NUGU and TMAP. Since 2019, it has developed Korean-based language models and released them as open source. From 2020, it partnered with the National Institute of the Korean Language to develop a Korean general language model (GLM) with performance similar to the ultra-large language model GPT-3.

Based on this, in May last year, SKT independently developed Korea’s first GPT-3 Korean specialization technology and introduced ‘A-dot,’ capable of fluent Korean conversations. Additionally, it is leading the ultra-large AI market by pursuing technical cooperation with domestic AI technology company Konan Technology and others.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.