LG said on the 6th that it held the practical program "LG Aimers Hackathon," which solves industrial challenges with artificial intelligence (AI) technology, at the LG Leadership Center in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, from the 4th for a two-day, one-night schedule.
LG Aimers is LG's flagship youth talent training program that reflects the talent development philosophy of Koo Kwang-mo, CEO of LG Corp., that "technology and innovation that change the world begin with people, and they are the very source of national competitiveness."
More than 20,000 young people have participated in LG Aimers since it began in the second half of 2022 through the first half of this year. LG plans to continue supporting the development of more than 50,000 cumulative young AI talents by 2030 so they can become a pillar of the nation's AI industry development.
Ninety-four young people took part in this competition, selected from 2,339 applicants for the eighth class of LG Aimers who passed from online education through the hackathon's online preliminaries. The topic is "developing a lightweight EXAONE model," assigned by LG AI Research.
Lightweighting a large language model (LLM) is an optimization technology that reduces the model's size and improves inference speed while maintaining the AI model's performance and accuracy. It is a core technology for running AI models independently inside individual devices such as laptops and smartphones.
Participants worked on the challenge of increasing the performance of EXAONE, the "national team AI," while reducing its size, and developed a total of 27 "lightweight EXAONE" models. LG plans to release the validated lightweight models on Hugging Face, a global open-source AI platform, so developers worldwide can actually use them.
An LG official said, "Although there is very high demand for large language model lightweighting technology in actual corporate field settings, it is an area where it is difficult to gain hands-on experience through intensive training," adding, "We expect it will help strengthen young people's competitiveness for employment in the AI industry."
LG awarded a total of 10 million won in prize money to the top three teams based on model performance, code evaluation, and oral presentations, and plans to offer them an exemption from the document screening stage when applying to join LG. The grand prize, the Minister of Employment and Labor Award, went to Park Seo-hui, Cho Ha-young, and Son Min-ju.
On the 5th, the second day of the competition, LG held a job fair with eight major affiliates participating: LG AI Research, LG Electronics, LG Display, LG Innotek, LG Energy Solution, LG H&H, LG Uplus, and LG CNS. That day, human resources managers from each company shared hiring information with the participants.
LG provides all processes free of charge, from graduate-level AI lectures to job application support activities. LG Aimers is open to any young person aged 19 to 29 with basic AI knowledge and coding skills, and it is held twice a year during the summer and winter vacations in consideration of academic schedules.