Krafton Appoints Lee Kanguk as New Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer

New CAIO Role... Former University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor
Dedicated to Advancing Game AI and Long-Term Research on Physical AI

Krafton announced on the 23rd that it has appointed Lee Kanguk, Head of the AI Division, as its Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO).

Lee Kangwook, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) of Krafton. Provided by Krafton.

The newly created CAIO position oversees Krafton's AI research and development, as well as its mid- to long-term technology strategy. Krafton explained that it decided on this appointment in recognition of the new CAIO Lee Kanguk's expertise in the AI field, his track record and leadership accumulated through AI technology research and projects, and his execution experience.

The new CAIO received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2016 and has served as a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2019. Since 2022, he has concurrently headed Krafton's AI Division, leading research and development in key AI areas such as machine learning, language models, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and multimodal models. He has also gained international recognition for his research achievements, including having a total of 57 Krafton papers accepted at leading global AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.

Last year, he led a collaborative project between Krafton and Nvidia, through which the company released a Co-Playable Character (CPC) that enables real-time interaction between users and AI, presenting new possibilities for expanding user experience. He has also participated in Krafton's proprietary AI foundation model project, taking the lead in the company's major technology development efforts. Recently, he resigned from his tenured professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to focus exclusively on Krafton's AI research and development and its mid- to long-term technology strategy.

Through this appointment, Krafton plans to further advance its game AI research and development framework and strengthen its mid- to long-term business strategy based on fundamental technologies. As part of this initiative, it will continue research on physical AI and robotics by establishing a separate entity called "Ludo Robotics." Ludo Robotics is being set up with a structure in which the parent company is based in the United States and a subsidiary is established in Korea, and CAIO Lee will lead the Korean subsidiary.

CAIO Lee said, "Krafton does not view AI as a technology that replaces humans and creativity, but as a tool that broadens imagination and creativity," adding, "We will explore the long-term expansion potential of AI technology and data, with our core business of games at the center."