South Korean AI startup Upstage announced on Dec. 14 that its self-developed large language model (LLM), 'Solar', has achieved a global first-place ranking in an open-source AI performance competition.
The ranking was listed on the 'Open LLM Leaderboard' operated by Hugging Face, a leading machine learning platform. Solar, unveiled on the same day, earned a score of 74.2 points, outperforming its international counterparts. Hugging Face is a competitive hub where technology firms and research organizations globally share and compete in AI capabilities, with rankings based on criteria such as reasoning, common sense, and language understanding.
Solar ranked first in the performance category, surpassing China's Alibaba's AI model 'Qwen', which scored 73.6 points, and France's Mistral AI, valued at $2 billion (2.6 trillion won), which scored 72.62 points. Despite having only 10.7 billion parameters, significantly fewer than one-sixth of Qwen's 720 parameters, Upstage credits its own optimization method for maximizing the performance of the smaller model.
This achievement marks the first time a Korean company's AI model has led the world in performance. Earlier in August, Upstage had achieved top performance on Hugging Face by tuning Meta's open AI 'Lama2.' This was due to the open nature of AI, which allows anyone to modify and improve the publicly available model. However, this recent accomplishment, achieved within four months, is attributed to the company's proprietary technology.
"It is significant that we beat both big tech and unicorn companies around the world," said a representative from Upstage. "We also released all of our newly released models so that anyone can use them commercially."
Upstage is now poised to enter the global generative AI market, targeting overseas markets in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AI platform 'Poe'. Upstage CEO Kim Seong-hoon said, "We are pleased to unveil a model that has overwhelmed the world's AI companies and hope that Solar will become a model for everyone."