[Independent AI Announcement] NC AI: "Industry-Wide Specialized AI Expansion... Equipped with Expertise, Security, and Efficiency"

AI Model Brand 'VAETKI' Unveiled
"Revolutionizing Business with Industry-Specialized AI"
100B-Parameter Model Completed... Projects Underway in Industrial Sites

NC AI is contributing to the AI transformation (AX) of various industries through its industry-specialized artificial intelligence (AI) models.

On December 30, Lee Yeonsu, CEO of NC AI, stated at the first announcement event for the Ministry of Science and ICT's 'Independent AI Foundation Model' project held at COEX in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, "We aim to become an independent foundation model that revolutionizes businesses through VAETKI's industry-specialized AI."

Lee Yeonsu, CEO of NC AI, is giving a presentation at the first announcement event of the Ministry of Science and ICT's 'Independent AI Foundation Model' project held on the 30th at COEX in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Photo by Lee Myunghwan

On this day, NC AI unveiled its AI foundation model brand, 'VAETKI,' for the first time. The name VAETKI stands for 'Vertical AI Engine for Transformation of Key Industries.' The model aims to be 'multi-scale,' usable across various devices, and 'multimodal,' capable of understanding different types of data such as images and audio.

CEO Lee explained, "VAETKI supports multi-scale, multimodal, and multi-modality models tailored to on-site characteristics, ranging from large-scale models to lightweight models and vision-language models (VLM). It is designed to accommodate and generate a wide range of industry data, supporting the development of specialized models optimized for each sector."

Lee emphasized, "For successful industry-specialized AI, expertise, security, and efficiency are crucial. Through these, we aim to support the AX of industrial sites." Expertise refers to enabling AI to understand on-site situations using field-specific data such as industry manuals and case law. Security involves building servers on internal corporate networks to block data at the source. Efficiency can be achieved by reducing operational costs through lightweight models.

The first phase of development also exceeded its initial targets. Lee stated, "We surpassed 100% of our phase one goals across three pillars: data, models, and deployment. We secured high-quality Korean language data and industry-specialized data, completed the development of a large language model (LLM) with 100 billion parameters, and are achieving tangible results by conducting deployment projects at more than 28 industrial sites."

Specifically, NC AI is carrying out projects for smart factory transformation and collaborating with Hyundai AutoEver in the field of industrial AI technology. In the logistics and distribution sectors, AX projects are underway with POSCO and Lotte, while in the cultural content domain, new intellectual property (IP) support projects are ongoing.

NC AI is also launching actual services. On December 22, it released 'Barco Voice,' a customized voice generation service, and 'Barco Translation,' a real-time translation service. On December 21, the company unveiled 'Barco 3D,' a 3D graphic generation service that allows users to create professional-level 3D characters using only simple text or image inputs.

Future plans were also announced. Lee said, "For the second phase, we plan to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) global performance with a high-performance model of 200 billion parameters," adding, "By 2026, we will complete demonstrations in the manufacturing, logistics, and content sectors, and based on this, we will certify global-level AI safety and reliability standards by 2027."