[AAA2023] 'Easy AI' Anyone Can Use... Upstage Wins Excellent Startup Award

On the 20th, at the Press Center in Jung-gu, Seoul, Lee Jeong-min, Secretary General of the Korea Venture Business Association, is taking a commemorative photo with Choi Hong-jun, Vice President of Upstage, who received the Excellent Startup Award from the Korea Venture Business Association at the '2023 Asia AI Awards Ceremony.' Photo by Jo Yong-jun jun21@

AI startup Upstage, known for its chatbot AI service ‘AskUp,’ received the Excellent Startup Award at the ‘2023 Asia AI Awards’ held on the 20th at the Press Center in Jung-gu, Seoul.

Upstage was highly praised for demonstrating its technological prowess globally, with its self-developed large language model (LLM) ‘Solar’ ranking first with a score of 74.2 on the ‘Open LLM Leaderboard’ operated by Hugging Face, the world’s largest machine learning platform.

Upstage gained widespread popularity with its chatbot service AskUp, launched through the KakaoTalk channel. AskUp, which integrates Upstage’s proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) technology with ChatGPT, was also called the ‘ChatGPT with eyes.’ AskUp surpassed 1 million users within two months of its launch. To date, it has secured over 1.5 million KakaoTalk channel friends, establishing itself as a symbol of generative AI in Korea.

Upstage combines its world-class OCR technology with AI to provide a ‘Document AI’ service that converts documents into text and extracts or summarizes content. Shortly after its launch, this service attracted clients from various industries, including financial institutions such as Samsung Life Insurance and Hanwha Life Insurance, as well as companies like Samsung SDS and KT.

Efforts to strengthen Korea’s AI competitiveness continue. Upstage launched the ‘1T Club’ to address the shortage of Korean language data and to achieve independence in Korean LLM development through high-performance LLMs. The ‘1T Club,’ short for ‘1 Trillion Token Club,’ consists of partner companies contributing over 100 million words of Korean data in various forms such as books, articles, reports, and papers. Through the 1T Club, Upstage aims to develop high-quality LLMs that capture the sentiment of Korean culture and contribute to the advancement of domestic AI.

Founded in October 2020, Upstage has been recognized for its technological capabilities by publishing 98 papers in prestigious domestic and international conferences. Upstage plans to actively enter the global generative AI market using ‘Solar.’