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Choi Seo-yeon, the CEO of Naver, unveils her company’s large language model “HyperCLOVA X” on Aug. 24. (courtesy of Naver)

“Tell me about that time that King Sejong tossed a MacBook.”

When that question was posed on Thursday to CLOVA X, which seeks to be Korea’s answer to ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot said, “That’s not consistent with the historical facts.”

The question might seem easy, but it still stumped ChatGPT, the chatbot that originated the generative AI craze, last November. “That happened in the 15th century,” ChatGPT infamously said at the time.

Real artificial intelligence ought to reach the right answer faster than humans, but it turned out to be a shameless liar.

For now, CLOVA X has surmounted a hurdle that ChatGPT failed to clear after its launch.

Naver unveiled its large language model HyperCLOVA X and the homegrown generative AI chatbot CLOVA X at its DAN 23 conference, which was held at a hotel in Seoul’s Gangnam District, on Thursday.

Naver is the latest tech company to be bitten by the generative AI bug that has been spreading around the world since OpenAI, the US-based AI developer, released ChatGPT last November. The Korean tech giant hopes to develop an AI that can provide answers grounded in a profound understanding of Korean and combine that with business models to gain dominance of the Korean AI ecosystem.

Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon was the keynote speaker at the conference. “We have invested over 1 trillion won in R&D over the last five years alone. That has enabled us to successfully develop the large language model called HyperCLOVA X. We will become leaders of the Korean AI ecosystem,” Choi said.

HyperCLOVA X represents a step forward from the HyperCLOVA language model that Naver built in 2021 with 204 billion parameters. A parameter refers to one of the connecting variables that AI uses to understand and respond to natural language (that is, human speech). The more parameters, the greater the capability of an AI language model.

Naver didn’t specify how many parameters are present in HyperCLOVA X, only remarking that the number is “massive.”

“HyperCLOVA X studies vast amounts of high-quality Korean language data that’s updated daily on Naver’s platform. In internal matchups against OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5, [HyperCLOVA X] has a win rate of around 75%,” said Sung Nako, head of hyperscale AI technology at Naver Cloud.

Sung Nako, the head of hyperscale AI at Naver Cloud. (courtesy of Naver)

Naver didn’t explain exactly how CLOVA X, which is a newcomer to the market, had won in matchups with generative AI developed overseas. But the company did stress that it has minimized the phenomenon of “hallucination.” CLOVA X has reportedly reduced hallucination by 72% by drawing upon data from the Naver Encyclopedia of Knowledge and other reliable sources.

Hallucination refers to the tendency for ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots to present lies as facts because of their lack of fact-checking functionality.

While CLOVA X’s beta service was launched on Aug. 24, it will only be provided to a limited number of users for the time being. The chatbot is capable not only of composing and summarizing texts but also of making deductions and doing translations. If job seekers, for example, ask the chatbot to act like an interviewer, it can keep a conversation going while asking a steady string of questions.

In Naver’s standard green search field, users have to input keywords like “Bundang restaurant” if they’re looking for a bite to eat. But it will soon be possible to ask natural questions such as, “Find a good brunch restaurant with a terrace in Bundang for this weekend.”

A peek at Naver’s AI search service “Cue.”

Cue (stylized as “Cue:”), a search service based on HyperCLOVA X that Naver will be releasing next month, will be able to process search results for long and complicated questions. If Naver makes Cue its main search engine, it will likely shake up the search advertising market.

“Cue will be closely integrated into our vertical services including Naver Shopping, Local and Naver Pay. This powerful technology and service will help Naver vendors, creators and partner companies further expand their business,” said Choi, the company’s CEO.

Naver intends to roll out more services based on HyperCLOVA X, including a composition tool called CLOVA for Writing and a generative AI-fueled advertising product called CLOVA for Ad.

By Lim Ji-sun, staff reporter

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