[Featured Stock] Company K, Upstage-Meta Collaborate on 'Llama 3'... Aiming for a 'Global Impact' to Rival OpenAI

Company K is showing strong performance. It appears that the news of Kim Seong-hoon, CEO of Upstage, meeting Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and conveying the opinions of domestic AI companies regarding Meta's LLM 'LLaMA' has influenced the stock price.

As of 9:36 AM on the 29th, Company K was trading at 8,610 KRW, up 1,350 KRW (18.60%) compared to the previous trading day.

CEO Kim Seong-hoon revealed through his social media (SNS) account that he met Zuckerberg the day before and conveyed the opinions of domestic AI companies about Meta's LLM 'LLaMA'.

Upstage has previously achieved the top fine-tuning performance for the 72B (7.2 billion parameter) model on the global generative AI sharing platform 'Hugging Face' using Meta's open-source LLM LLaMA. Based on its proprietary LLM 'SOLA', Upstage is developing generative AI businesses both domestically and internationally.

CEO Kim also proposed a solution to Meta for the issue of LLaMA's lower performance in local languages other than English. He told Meta, "There is a need to create a collaborative program like Meta Residency (tentative name) to select a team from each country and jointly develop the LLM to perform well in local languages ahead of the LLaMA-3 launch." He also added a request to select Upstage as the representative from Korea.

Kim's side argues that if Meta goes beyond simply releasing the LLaMA-3 foundation model and launches foundation models specialized for each country's language, such as 'LLaMA-3 KR (tentative)' and 'LLaMA-3 JP (tentative)', Meta could create a global impact capable of catching up with OpenAI and Google.

Upstage is also jointly developing and commercializing 'On-Device AI Office', which runs generative AI directly within the product, together with Polaris Office, a specialist in office software (SW). On-Device AI is an AI that installs a lightweight large language model (LLM) directly on personal devices such as smartphones and computers, enabling the use of generative AI without an internet connection. It has recently emerged as a new paradigm. It operates in closed network environments such as government agencies and financial sectors, and its offline usage fundamentally blocks sensitive information leaks, enhancing security.

Upstage announced that it will integrate its pre-trained large language model (LLM) 'SOLA' into the global document software 'Polaris Office' and introduce the world's first on-device AI-based office solution.

The On-Device AI Office equipped with SOLA is scheduled to be released starting with the Apple Mac operating system (OS) version, and purchase inquiries and pre-orders will begin on the 1st of next month.

Kwon Soon-il, Vice President of Business at Upstage, stated, "We will expand various generative AI services led by world-class LLM technology and increase our presence in the global market."

Company K led Upstage's Series A investment round and is known to have invested about 10 billion KRW. At that time, SoftBank Ventures, TBT, Premier, Stonebridge Ventures, and others collectively invested a total of 31.6 billion KRW. Byeon Jun-young, Vice President of Company K, concurrently serves as a non-executive director at Upstage.