[AI Revolution](26) Expert AI Developing Cancer Vaccines and OLED Materials… LG Exaone

"We will strengthen our business portfolio centered on new growth engines such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Bio, and Clean Tech, and work harder to secure a future foundation to prepare for 10 to 15 years from now." (Koo Kwang-mo, Chairman of LG Group, March 29, LG Shareholders' Meeting)

Since Chairman Koo Kwang-mo took office, LG has identified AI as the core axis of its future business portfolio. LG plans to invest 3.6 trillion KRW in research and development in AI and data fields over the next five years to drive technological innovation.

EXAONE, the super-large AI developed by LG AI Research, is at the center of LG's AI business. To strengthen AI capabilities, LG gathered AI development personnel scattered across various affiliates into LG AI Research in 2020. This group-level AI research hub, LG AI Research, succeeded in developing the super-large AI EXAONE within one year of its establishment. This was the result of a bold investment of 100 million USD, approximately 128.3 billion KRW, in the initial development alone.

[Photo by LG]

An Expert for Humans... 'Bilingual AI' Surpassing ChatGPT

EXAONE stands for "EXpert Ai for everyONE," and also carries the meaning of the prefix "EXA," which denotes 10 to the 18th power, or 100 quintillion. Assuming all words ever used by humanity are stored as data, the amount would be about 5 exabytes, a very large unit suitable for gauging the scale of super-large AI.

Currently, EXAONE has learned from over 600 billion tokens (units of language understood by AI) and more than 350 million paired image-text data, enabling bidirectional data generation between language and images. Notably, it has grown into a "bilingual AI" that simultaneously learns the characteristics of both Korean and English. Korean data accounts for only 0.6% of global internet data, while English data makes up 60%, making this bilingual capability significant. EXAONE is equipped with an artificial neural network that can autonomously learn not only professional literature such as academic papers but also formulas, tables, and images. Based on this, while existing AI could analyze text to find images, EXAONE can create a new image of a "pumpkin-shaped hat" when asked, by independently judging based on learned information.

Advertising image created with a spring image designed by Exa One.
[Photo by LG]

Problem Solver in Industrial Fields... Stepping Forward to Vaccine Development

EXAONE is active in various fields without being limited to specific uses. Unlike ChatGPT, which is publicly available for anyone to use, EXAONE is utilized in industrial fields such as IT, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecommunications. The first collaboration was with Woori Bank. LG and Woori Bank plan to develop AI bankers, future-oriented branch services, and next-generation financial services. The AI banker is scheduled to be unveiled by the end of this year.

At this stage, EXAONE's use is mainly focused on pilot applications within LG Group affiliates. The group companies conducting EXAONE application projects include ▲LG Electronics (product demand forecasting, PCV automatic design, etc.) ▲LG Display (next-generation OLED emitting material development) ▲LG Innotek (inspection process vision inspection) ▲LG Chem (naphtha scheduling optimization) ▲LG Energy Solution (lithium-sulfur battery electrolyte development) ▲LG Household & Health Care (product design) ▲LG Uplus (app store customer review analysis), among others.

Efforts are also accelerating in developing personalized anticancer vaccine neoantigens. LG AI Research has developed an AI model that predicts neoantigens inducing the death of cancer cells by using patients' genetic information and cancer cell mutation data. Compared to existing prediction models, this model shows the best performance and is expected to significantly shorten the development period for personalized anticancer vaccines.

[Photo by LG AI Research Institute website capture]

'Talent' Comes First in AI Innovation... Active Recruitment and Training

LG is focusing on attracting AI talent as a strategy to grow its business. For example, LG AI Research, which started with about 70 members in its early days, has tripled in size to about 220 members as of last year.

Talent development efforts are also active. After Chairman Koo took office, LG established LG Technology Ventures and LG AI Research twice in 2018 and 2020. Recently, LG officially opened "LG Discovery Lab Seoul" in Magok, Seoul. This educational facility was planned with the purpose of providing youth living in the AI era with education that allows them to directly experience the future changes AI technology will bring and discover their own potential. Last month, Chairman Koo Kwang-mo invited about 400 talents related to new businesses such as AI, Bio, and Clean Tech to the "LG Tech Conference," held for the first time in four years, emphasizing the importance of group-level research and development (R&D) by stating, "Technology and innovation to realize dreams, and the people and talents who make this possible are precious."

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