LG AI Research said on the 22nd that it agreed with Nvidia to strengthen a technology alliance to expand the "K-EXAONE (EXAONE (LG AI Research))" ecosystem.
The previous day, executives of the two companies met at the Seoul Magok headquarters of LG AI Research to discuss strategies for cooperation on next-generation AI model development and the joint building of an AI ecosystem. Attendees included Lim Woo-hyung, co-head of research at LG AI Research; Lee Jin-sik, head of the EXAONE Lab; Bryan Catanzaro, vice president at Nvidia; and Jung So-young, head of Nvidia Korea.
The two companies decided to expand the scope of cooperation by jointly developing models specialized for professional fields by combining LG's AI model "EXAONE (EXAONE (LG AI Research))" with Nvidia's Nemotron open ecosystem. LG AI Research and Nvidia have maintained close technical collaboration from EXAONE 3.0 to K-EXAONE and the Multimodal AI EXAONE 4.5 unveiled early this month.
In the course of developing EXAONE, LG AI Research secured data training quality by leveraging the Nemotron open dataset, while Nvidia provided its latest GPUs (Blackwell), AI development platform (NeMo Framework), and inference-acceleration software (TensorRT-LLM), helping optimize AI model training and improve inference performance and efficiency.
The efforts have produced tangible results. In the "AI Index Report" recently published by the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute (HAI) at Stanford University, the United States, Korea ranked third after the United States and China with five notable AI models. Of these, four were part of LG AI Research's EXAONE series: ▲ Korea's first reasoning model "EXAONE Deep" ▲ the medical-specialized AI "EXAONE Path 2.0" ▲ Korea's first hybrid model "EXAONE 4.0" ▲ the national AI model "K-EXAONE."
Bryan Catanzaro, vice president at Nvidia, said, "As a key partner of LG AI Research, Nvidia has joined forces to make EXAONE Korea's top AI model," and added, "By combining LG's EXAONE with Nvidia's Nemotron, we will lead sovereign AI and help expand the ecosystem."
Lim Woo-hyung, co-head of research at LG AI Research, said, "Nvidia is a core technology partner that has developed EXAONE with us," and added, "We will broaden LG and Nvidia's cooperation one step further into the spread of the research and development ecosystem and deliver sovereign AI results that can be felt on the industrial front lines."
Meanwhile, Koo Kwang-mo, head of LG Corp., met early this month in Silicon Valley with Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, a global leader in AX, and with Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, co-founders of Skild AI, a world authority in physical AI, to exchange insights to accelerate AX.