Krafton said on the 23rd that it will appoint Kangwook Lee, Krafton Deputy Minister of artificial intelligence (AI), as the new chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO). The CAIO, newly created for this appointment, is the top executive overseeing Krafton's AI research and development and mid- to long-term technology strategy.
Krafton said it decided on the appointment in high regard of the new CAIO's expertise in AI, research track record accumulated while concurrently conducting AI technology research and project operations, leadership, and execution experience.
The new CAIO, born in 1988, earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley in 2016 and has served as a professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 2019.
From 2022, Lee also served as Krafton Deputy Minister of AI, focusing on streamlining Krafton's AI research system and advancing its technological capabilities. In particular, Lee led research and development in key AI fields including Machine Learning, language models (LM), natural language processing (NLP), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and multimodal models. Lee also helped get a total of 57 Krafton papers accepted at global AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.
Last year, Lee oversaw a collaborative project with Nvidia, unveiling CPC (collaborative playable character), in which users and AI interact in real time, presenting new possibilities for expanding user experience. Since last year, Lee has participated in an independent AI foundation model project and has been leading Krafton's key technology development. Recently, Lee resigned from a tenured professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to focus on Krafton's AI research and development and mid- to long-term technology strategy.
Krafton said, "Through this personnel move, we plan to further advance our game AI research and development system and strengthen our mid- to long-term business strategy based on fundamental technologies." The specific AI strategy will be pushed forward around three pillars: user experience innovation, production and operation efficiency, and securing mid- to long-term new growth engines.
User experience innovation aims to advance AI technologies applicable to games and improve the completeness of AI-based interactive content such as CPC. In the production phase, Krafton plans to advance data analysis and production support technologies, and in the operation phase, it plans to leverage user data to raise service quality and stability.
In the mid- to long-term new business field, Krafton will continue research on physical AI and Robotics. The research will be carried out through a separate corporation. Preparations are underway with a structure that places the parent company in the United States and establishes a subsidiary in Korea. The corporate name is "Ludo Robotics," and the Korean entity will be led by CAIO Kangwook Lee.
Krafton CAIO Kangwook Lee said, "Krafton does not view AI as a technology that replaces humans and creation, but as a tool that broadens imagination and creativity," adding, "We will review the long-term scalability of AI technologies and data in parallel, with games as our core business."