South Korean tech giant Kakao Corp. said Friday it has developed a multimodal large language model (MLLM) named Honeybee in a bid to expand its presence in the artificial intelligence market.

During an AI strategy meeting hosted by the Ministry of Science and ICT, Kakao’s CEO nominee Chung Shin-a revealed that her company has completed the development of Honeybee.

This upgraded large language model goes beyond conventional text understanding by incorporating vision and image comprehension capabilities.

Built upon the MLLM foundation, Honeybee is able to understand both images and text simultaneously, making it possible to respond to inquiries related to mixed image and text content, according to Kakao.

Kakao said it has shared Honeybee and its inference code on Github, an online software development platform and an open source community, to facilitate the widespread advancement of MLLMs globally.

During the government-led event, meanwhile, Kakao’s incoming leader stressed the importance of cooperation a
mong local AI companies with a shared objective of targeting the global market.

“Through the AI wave initiated by ChatGPT, I feel responsible for having our own language model,” Chung said, adding that Kakao’s rival Naver Corp. is also working to develop a Korean-based language model. “In the times of AI, I believe cooperation between companies and the creation of an ecosystem are very important.”

Choi Soo-yeon, CEO of Naver, emphasized that South Korean developers’ potential and called for the government’s support to help them compete with global tech giants “100 times bigger” in size in the AI market in a time when technology can affect people’s way of thinking and acting.

“There are many companies in South Korea that are developing super-sized AI models,” she said. “They will create an opportunity for South Korea to become an AI-advanced country, making the current year particularly important for development in this field.”

Source: Yonhap News Agency