[AI Revolution](125) AI Created by 'Mungwa Students'... WantedLab Lowers the Barrier with Simple Commands

LLM Service Development Tool 'Wanted LaaS' Launched
"The Distinction Between Developers and Non-Developers Disappears in the Generative AI Era"
"A Tool for Everyone to Easily Utilize AI Is Essential"

AI Revolution Interview - Joo Hyung-min, Head of AX Business Development at Wanted Lab, is being interviewed by Asia Economy at the office in Lotte World Tower, Jamsil, Songpa-gu. Photo by Jo Yong-jun jun21@

In 2015, the founding members of Wanted Lab put over 100 business ideas through a tournament and chose ‘recruitment.’ They judged it to be a sustainable business as long as companies continue to hire people. They concretized the business with the ‘Wanted’ service, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to match job seekers with job openings. Wanted has matched over 28,900 companies and 3.44 million members more than 10 million times, achieving a success rate more than four times higher than general applications.

More than ten years later, in May, Wanted Lab gathered internal ideas using its self-developed large language model (LLM) as a service, ‘Wanted LaaS (LLM-as-a-Service).’ Wanted LaaS is a tool that allows the development of LLM-based services through simple command manipulation without complex coding. Lowering the technical barrier encouraged even non-developers to come up with over 50 ideas needed in their fields. The service development period, which used to take at least two weeks, was reduced to three days. While the company initially bet on one promising business among many ideas, this time it has the technology to implement all 50 ideas.

Having confirmed its potential, the company launched Wanted LaaS as a corporate subscription product. Although it started as a human resources (HR) solutions company, it confidently claimed that its AI operational know-how is on par with AI specialist companies. Joo Hyung-min, Head of AX Business Development at the company, said, “Traditionally, when each department requested necessary functions, the IT department would implement them, clearly distinguishing between development and non-development roles. However, this approach does not fit the generative AI era.” If a developer’s intervention is needed every time the model gives a wrong answer, speed and cost efficiency suffer. That is why a tool that allows anyone to easily create services is necessary.

Wanted LaaS embodies this awareness of the problem. Without the need to test the rapidly emerging LLMs and new versions daily, it incorporates models verified by Wanted Lab, including Google Gemini, OpenAI GPT-4, Anthropic Claude, and Naver HyperCLOVA X. It uses ‘Function Calling’ to invoke desired functions and a ‘Sandbox’ feature to share them externally. It is also possible to monitor the costs of operating services and switch to more cost-effective versions. Joo emphasized, “The biggest feature is that it can be supplemented on the fly based on user feedback.”

Wanted Lab promotes Wanted LaaS through Prompthon, a compound word of ‘prompt’ (command) and ‘marathon.’ It is a competition to create new services within a set time using Wanted LaaS. In July, Prompthon was held with 170 teams of office workers participating. Impressive results came from non-developer groups, such as a work classification system by three Samjong KPMG management consultants (breaking down consulting projects into smaller tasks) and a chatbot for writing student records by a middle school Korean language teacher.

Prompthon is translating into business achievements. Grep, an operator of a developer career platform, signed a subscription contract for all employees to use Wanted Lab LaaS. They highly valued the extraction of use cases specialized for companies as a development tool. Joo said, “The market is overly focused on technology, such as developing better models and securing more graphics processing units (GPUs). It is more important to secure the fastest and easiest means to apply generative AI.”