'US Corporation Established' Upstage "Will Achieve Results in Financial and Legal AI"

"We are challenging the global artificial intelligence (AI) standardization."

On the 20th (local time) at the San Jose Convention Center in California, USA, Choi Hong-jun, Vice President of the Korean AI startup Upstage, whom we met at NVIDIA's ‘GTC 2024’ exhibition, summarized his aspirations for entering the U.S. market as such.

Upstage is a four-year-old startup established in 2020. After building achievements by independently developing the large language model (LLM) ‘Sola’ in Korea, it established a corporation in the U.S. this month. With the ambition to surpass OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, it has settled in Silicon Valley, the startup mecca.

Vice President Choi Hong-jun (left) and CEO Kim Seong-hoon of Upstage are taking a photo at the 'GTC 2024' exhibition booth in San Jose, USA, on the 20th (local time). /

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The debut stage was NVIDIA’s event, which has become synonymous with AI. Vice President Choi said, "After announcing our entry into the U.S. market, we thought about how to increase our recognition in the local market."

During the event, various companies and institutions from different countries visited Upstage’s booth. A Swiss telecommunications company approached them wanting to create their own AI model, and a famous laptop company inquired about AI PC collaboration. Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, USA, also visited and praised the business as impressive and offered support.

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, also knocked on Upstage’s door. Visiting Korea for the first time in 10 years, Zuckerberg met with well-known Korean AI and extended reality (XR) startups, including Upstage, to discuss AI collaboration.

Based on a diverse business portfolio including not only Sola but also AI optical character recognition (OCR), the company has secured major clients such as POSCO Holdings, Samsung Life Insurance, LG Electronics, Samsung SDS, and KT. In the case of Sola, it ranked first in the open LLM leaderboard of Hugging Face (a machine learning platform) last year, surpassing OpenAI (GPT 3.5) and Meta (LLaMA 2).

The CEO, vice president, and employees of Upstage are taking a photo with Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, USA (second from the left counterclockwise) at the GTC exhibition booth. /
[Photo by Upstage]

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Upstage is focusing on the growth potential of generative AI and robotics AI. This is the reason for establishing the North American corporation.

Vice President Choi said, "More processes in the North American market are done manually than expected," and added, "Many investors are now investing in robotics, so we see high growth potential." He emphasized, "If generative AI goes together with this field, there will be great synergy."

In the short term, the goal is to achieve results in sectors such as finance, healthcare, mobility, e-commerce, and legal services in the U.S. The ultimate business direction is ‘AI for everyone,’ that is, the popularization of AI.

Vice President Choi said, "We want to be recognized for our technology by big tech companies like Mistral AI or American AI language model developers and receive larger investments here," and added, "We are currently working on several proposals and business plans, so we have high expectations for creating references."

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