AI startup Upstage establishes new branch in Silicon Valley to target N. American market

By Kim Joo-heon Posted : March 18, 2024, 15:44 Updated : March 18, 2024, 15:44
[Courtesy of Upstage]

SEOUL -- South Korean artificial intelligence technology developer Upstage has opened its new branch in Silicon Valley to expand its presence in North America. The new branch called "Upstage AI" will showcase its large language model-based solution "Solar" at the GPU Technology Conference, a global AI event held by Nvidia.

Solar is a deep-learning-based AI platform with content understanding and generation capabilities. The solution achieved the top position on an international large language model scoreboard hosted by Hugging Face, an AI company based in New York City, in August 2023. This competition included about 500 models, including GPT-3, a service based on ChatGPT.

Upstage said its US branch will explore collaboration opportunities with promising IT firms in Silicon Valley. The US branch will demonstrate application cases of Solar during the GPU Technology Conference, the four-day event in San Jose set to take place on March 18. Upstage estimates about 300,000 visitors will participate this year.

"We will leverage our world-class platform Solar to provide optimized LLM solutions to American and global enterprises, seek various cooperation opportunities, and successfully achieve global expansion," Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon said in a statement on March 18. The company aims to later expand its market into Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

Upstage plans to upgrade Solar by integrating the LLM model with optical character recognition (OCR) technology, which extracts vital information from handwritten text images, enabling seamless conversion into machine-encoded text. Upstage's OCR technique is currently used by "FoodLens," an AI solution that suggests various types of recipes depending on dietary goals and eating habits. The dietary management solution, run by South Korea's favorite smartphone messenger app Kakao Talk, offers nutritional information based on pictures of food. 

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