Lee Kangwook, Head of AI Office at KRAFTON
The SK Telecom Consortium has taken on the national challenge of establishing AI Sovereignty for the Republic of Korea. The SK Telecom Consortium, selected as an elite team for the ‘Proprietary AI Foundation Model Development Project” by the Ministry of Science and ICT, has assembled a group of the top specialized companies from various industries including gaming, automotive, semiconductor, data, and search to develop a next-generation large Omnimodal Model.
Among them, Krafton, the creator of ‘PUBG: Battlegrounds,’ is a core partner leading the architectural design and learning algorithm research for the next-generation multimodal model. Krafton is integrating the AI technology it has accumulated in the gaming industry into SKT’s K-AI model development. SKT Newsroom interviewed Lee Kang-wook, Head of Krafton AI Office to hear about Krafton’s technical role and the potential of game AI.
* This article contains the views of another company and may not represent SK Telecom’s official position.
Expanding Game-Built AI Expertise to National-Scale AI Innovation
Q. How do you feel about being selected as an elite team for the Proprietary AI Foundation Model Development Project?
A. We are deeply honored to be selected as an elite team, and we feel a great sense of responsibility. Krafton has utilized publicly available AI foundation models in the game domain, fine-tuning them for our needs, but we have often faced difficulties due to missing necessary functions. Through this project, we hope to directly create the models that Korean companies truly need and provide opportunities for domestic AI capabilities to grow to the next level.
Q. What is Krafton’s role in the consortium, and what distinct competitive edge is the company contributing?
A. Krafton has been one of the most prolific Korean companies in terms of publishing papers at global AI academic conferences over the past three years. This means we have strengths in pilot studies and possess abundant source technology. Based on this distinct competitive edge, we plan to contribute to the architectural design and learning algorithm research for the multimodal foundation model.
Furthermore, as a game service company that interacts directly with users worldwide, we have rich experience in applying and improving AI in real-world services.
The Competitive Edge K-AI Gained from Global Game Expertise
Q. Krafton is leading the architectural design and learning algorithm research for the multimodal model. Could you elaborate on the specific technologies being applied?
A. Krafton has been introducing various generative AI technologies into games. We have accumulated rich research experience and know-how in the fields of voice and image synthesis, and specifically, our voice synthesis technology is highly regarded globally. The research experience and know-how Krafton possesses in voice and image synthesis technology will be directly applied to the multimodal foundation model, which is the elite team’s development goal.
Furthermore, we have extensive experience designing AI Agents using foundation models. Notably, through our experience developing Co-Playable Characters (CPC) that can naturally interact and play alongside users within games, we have accumulated know-how for ensuring foundation models operate stably in environments where the model must autonomously perceive situations, make judgments, and take action. Moreover, we possess a benchmark called ”Orak” that can evaluate AI Agents in various game environments, and we plan to contribute to verifying the performance of the foundation model using games.
Q. What is the role of the multimodal dataset based on game play data?
A. Everything a game character sees, hears, feels, and does is converted into data. This data becomes multimodal data that is difficult to obtain in the real world. By utilizing this for model training, we expect to obtain a model that performs better in multimodal situations than existing foundation models.
AI Model Completed with Korean Technology, From Start to Finish
Q. What do you think are the strengths of the SKT elite team?
A. First, SKT is a company with experience in developing its own foundation model. Second, our consortium is a team capable of executing the entire AI process entirely with our own technology, from beginning to end including pilot studies, data, accelerators, training, and services. We possess a complete AI ecosystem encompassing AI pilot studies (Krafton, Seoul National University, KAIST, University of Wisconsin), data collection (SelectStar), accelerators (Rebellions), training (SKT), and service implementation (Krafton, 42dot, Liner). We believe this structure, which allows us to complete the AI ecosystem ourselves, is a significant strength unique to our team.
Q. How is the collaboration proceeding?
A. Krafton is currently operating a joint war room in Seongsu-dong and working closely with participating institutions. Recently, we have been jointly developing a reinforcement learning algorithm for language model training with SKT. By combining SKT’s large-scale training experience and Krafton’s experimental research capabilities, we are quickly identifying points for algorithmic improvement and applying them to actual training to achieve results.
Q. What do you see as the strengths of the K-AI model in the global competitive environment?
A. Not many countries can directly handle the entire AI process from beginning to end. Korea is one of the few nations that can independently develop everything, from AI accelerators, data, and models to services.
It allows for the optimal model development by considering the entire process, not just isolating the model training phase. For instance, by considering the model and service together, we can create an optimized model, and by considering the model and accelerator together, we can implement a model that runs efficiently on the hardware. Furthermore, closely linking model training and data collection can achieve target performance while reducing time and cost. We believe that by leveraging these advantages unique to Korea, we can create a K-AI model with strengths even in the global competitive environment.
Q. What is Krafton’s goal and commitment towards the development of the proprietary AI foundation model?
A. Just as PUBG surprised gamers worldwide, Krafton’s AI team also aims to create technology that will surprise the whole world. Based on our experience in the global market and understanding of data, we plan to quickly introduce various services utilizing the K-AI model and create a global success story for Korean AI models.
