NCSOFT's artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary, NC AI, announced on the 27th that it aims to emerge as a vertical AI corporation beyond the field of game AI.
NC AI, based on NCSOFT's 14 years of AI research expertise, was spun off in February of last year and launched as an independent corporation. NC AI is rapidly bringing commercially available AI solutions to market across various industries, including gaming, fashion, and content. In particular, the core of NC AI's technological capability lies in its self-developed large language model (LLM) called "Barco LLM." Barco LLM has enhanced its Korean performance by adding NC AI's unique fine-tuning technology to its self-built foundation model technology. The Barco model, unveiled in September of last year, achieved first place among models with fewer than 10 billion parameters in the Logic Korea benchmark and has demonstrated top performance in various fields, including reasoning, mathematics, writing, coding, and grammar.
In particular, Barco LLM is optimized for various industrial fields where Korean is essential, such as chatbots, QA, natural language generation, and automatic translation. Last year, it introduced "Barco LLM 2.0," which significantly improved multilingual support performance, as well as the evaluation model "Barco Judge LLM" for validating LLM performance. This evaluation model has established itself as the industry standard for solving bias issues in LLMs, providing rapid quality assessments, and selecting optimal models for specific services.
Barco LLM also contributes to the open-source ecosystem. NC AI has made this model publicly available on Hugging Face, supporting startups, developers, and small to medium enterprises to utilize it freely. NC AI plans to continue releasing developed LLM models, encouraging the launch and utilization of AI services and laying the foundation for social benefits from advancements in AI technology.
Additionally, NC AI's "Barco Art Fashion," which showcases the potential of vertical AI, is a generative AI model specialized for the fashion industry that has successfully commercialized both domestically and internationally. Based on a "fashion-specific base model" that has learned industry jargon and trends related to padding jumpers and down jumpers, this model automatically generates over 10 design proposals in just 3.2 seconds when a designer inputs prompts in natural language. It supports all functionalities needed in the actual fashion industry, such as fabric changes, transformation to 2D and 3D, outline extraction, outfit image synthesis, sneaker mockups, and trend product suggestions. F&F, known for brands like MLB and Discovery, has adopted the "Barco Art" solution on a paid basis after concept verification (PoC) with NC AI, proving the effectiveness of business innovation by reducing the product development cycle from the previous six months to three months. Currently, more than ten fashion companies are considering additional adoption.
NC AI also possesses outstanding technology in the field of game AI, based on NCSOFT's experience developing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Notably, its AI non-player character (NPC) dialogue system analyzes players' conversation patterns in real-time to provide customized quests and dialogues. In global servers, real-time multilingual chat translation based on Barco LLM allows users worldwide to communicate without language barriers. Various AI technologies, such as text-to-speech (TTS), voice cloning, emotional acting, and motion capture, have also been commercialized to create natural voices, expressions, lip-syncing, and animations for NPCs. These technologies are planned to be opened in the form of an interface (API) to upcoming game releases scheduled for 2025 and various external game studios.
Already, NC AI's AI voice synthesis, voice cloning, and AI dubbing technologies are being utilized in various ways across OTT content, movies, and dramas. For example, NC AI's TTS and voice conversion technologies naturally apply the actual voices and emotions of actors to the lines of native speakers, breaking down language barriers. In an OTT drama set to be released in the first half of 2025, NC AI's voice synthesis technology has been applied, allowing actors' voices to be seamlessly converted into foreign languages, significantly improving global dubbing quality. The AI dubbing service involves converting the voice in the video into text, translating it, and synthesizing it back into voice, automating multilingual dubbing. This helps K-content reduce localization expenses and time, facilitating global expansion.
NC AI is also taking the lead in data protection and AI ethics. Barco LLM applies an ethical AI framework that meets global standards for bias resolution capabilities, data privacy, transparency, and explainability. By internalizing industry-specific regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the U.S. and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, as well as anonymizing data, it is gaining the trust of corporate clients.
NC AI는 데이터 보호와 AI 윤리에도 앞장서고 있다. 바르코 LLM은 편향성 문제 해결 능력, 데이터 프라이버시, 투명성, 설명 가능성 등 글로벌 기준에 부합하는 윤리적 AI 프레임워크를 적용하고 있다. 미국 의료정보보호법(HIPAA), 유럽 일반개인정보보호법(GDPR) 등 산업별 규제를 내재화하고 데이터를 익명화하는 등 노력을 통해 기업고객의 신뢰를 얻고 있다.
Lee Yeon-soo, the representative of NC AI, noted, "NC AI will continue to create innovative AI services that add practical value across industries, as well as develop LLMs that will serve as the foundation for the advancement of AI technology in our country," adding, "We will establish ourselves as partners who achieve both efficiency and productivity beyond just providing technology."