Seoul, Jul 19 (IANS): LG AI Research, the artificial intelligence lab under LG Group, unveiled the second generation of its giant, multimodal AI model on Wednesday, accelerating its efforts to become a force to be reckoned with in the increasingly competitive global AI race.

The EXAONE 2.0 operates faster and more efficiently and saves more energy, compared with the first version introduced in December 2021, Bae Kyung-hoon, chief of LG AI Research, said at the LG AI Talk Concert at LG Science Park in western Seoul.

EXAONE, short for expert AI for everyone, is a giant, multimodal language model that can understand both language and images simultaneously, thus being capable of image-to-text generation and vice versa. Multimodal means having multiple modes of communicating a message.

The research centre said the new version has evolved through machine learning of 45 million patent papers, which LG said is by far the biggest professional dataset for any AI service developing company, and 350 million images, reports Yonhap news agency.

The latest version operates both in Korean and English, considering a vast amount of the dataset EXAONE is trained on is in English, Bae said, adding the size of the dataset is four times larger than the previous one.

EXAONE's deep learning algorithm, Bae said, can understand, recognise and predict text and learn from huge volumes of data to provide viable solutions and help answer complex questions in various fields.

The research center said EXAONE has three professional platforms: Universe, Discovery and Atelier.

EXAONE Universe is a chatbot service for professionals in the chemical, pharmaceutical, medical and financial sectors, among others. The service is set to initially open to some LG researchers on July 31.

Discovery is a platform to support new discoveries, particularly in the bioscience sector, and dramatically shorten the time to conduct experiments. LG said it will open the service to local researchers in the fourth quarter to help them with their research.

LG Group established LG AI Research in 2020. Last year, the group said it would invest 3.6 trillion won ($2.8 billion) in AI research and development over the next five years.