[Click eStock] "Kakao, AI Model Cost Reduction Trend"

Hana Securities analyzed on the 5th that concerns about costs after the actual commercialization of Kakao's artificial intelligence (AI) models are limited, given the trend of decreasing AI model costs.

Kakao announced the day before that it would collaborate with OpenAI to advance its AI services.

Junho Lee, a researcher at Hana Securities, introduced, "Kakao adopts a method of providing services utilizing APIs of external AI models in addition to its self-developed AI models." He added, "Kakao plans to advance all its services, including KakaoTalk, Kanana, and mobility, by leveraging AI," and explained, "The direction of actively utilizing external AI models to improve existing services and launch new ones is positive."

He said, "The announcement of collaboration with OpenAI is significant in applying a global frontier AI model to Kakao's services," and predicted, "It can be expanded to collaborations with other models such as Meta's LLaMA and Google's Gemini in the future."

The researcher analyzed, "Concerns about cost burdens before the monetization stage may arise as external AI models are commercialized," but added, "The release of low-cost, high-performance open-source models DeepSeek V3 and R1 is fueling AI price competition."

Furthermore, he emphasized, "The total cost of LLM models has been continuously decreasing even before the DeepSeek issue," and "depending on the service, lightweight models can also be adopted, allowing services to be provided at efficient costs." He expected, "Profitability will be secured through the introduction of subscription plans following traffic acquisition after integrating external AI models."