South Korean conglomerate launches AI solution on AWS that generates 2,000 image captions per hour at 66% lower cost and with 83% faster data processing than on-premises infrastructure

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that LG AI Research (LG AI), the artificial intelligence (AI) research hub of South Korean conglomerate LG Group, has launched its AI image-to-text captioning solution on AWS. The new captioning solution uses LG AI’s EXAONE, a 300-billion-parameter, multimodal foundation model (FM) that creates more accurate and relevant content for worldwide customers across industries like advertising, fashion, and retail.

EXAONE’s new zero-shot, image-captioning solution uses generative AI to automatically understand and describe unseen objects or scenes, much like human cognition, using previous experiences, knowledge, and training. This ability enables EXAONE to write accurate image captions and keywords with a high level of detail, using near-human deductions while comprehending images and text in both Korean and English. Industries like advertising can use LG AI’s technology to automate product descriptions or create new content for advertising and marketing campaigns. LG AI uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, to cost effectively scale IT resources on demand as the number of parameters expands during EXAONE’s training.

Leveraging the scalability of AWS, LG AI’s customers, including consumer-goods companies and marketing agencies, can generate more than 2,000 image captions per hour. LG AI trained EXAONE with 350 million high-resolution images and text pairs using Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models. Using the cloud, LG AI can finetune results, implement checkpoints, and quickly resolve issues like data bias, faster and at a lower cost than on-premises infrastructure.

“AI is revolutionizing many industries, and we are excited about this technology’s potential to cost effectively help people become more creative,” said Edward Lee, vice president of LG AI Research. “LG AI's EXAONE is a powerful tool that makes generative AI more accessible for creative fields, and AWS’s industry-leading machine learning capabilities have helped us to rapidly develop and deploy our innovative solutions. Our vision is to help creatives drive new levels of efficiency and enable companies to focus on creating rather than on tedious activities like image searches.”

Through EXAONE, LG AI is collaborating with organizations worldwide to accelerate the adoption of generative AI across a range of creative industries. This includes a collaboration with Parsons School of Design, a leading U.S. college, to develop technologies and services involving generative AI with experts in fashion, design, and media. LG AI also developed Tilda, an AI virtual artist that uses EXAONE to produce all-new images when given text prompts. Tilda created 3,000 images and patterns to help fashion designer Younhee Park create more than 200 outfits for 2022 New York Fashion Week.

LG AI is also delivering generative AI solutions to companies across the LG Group. In August, LG Household & Health Care launched ‘IMPRINTU,’ an instant temporary tattoo printer that uses LG AI's generative AI technology on AWS to create thousands of unique designs that can be printed on skin or clothing. LG AI will also provide its EXAONE model to LG affiliated companies to generate software code and boost the productivity and creativity of its engineers who are developing household appliances and home entertainment products of tomorrow.

“Generative AI is one of the most transformational technologies of our lifetime, significantly impacting productivity and creativity,” said Vasi Philomin, vice president of Generative AI at AWS. “As the content generation industry booms, LG AI Research is showing how technology like the EXAONE ideation platform can foster better collaboration between AI, designers, and artists with its rapid image-to-text captioning solution built on AWS. We look forward to supporting LG’s AI research institute in scaling its generative AI innovations to unleash new levels of creativity worldwide.”

The LG AI EXAONE image-to-text solution is now available to millions of AWS’s global active customers through AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors, and on Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart, an ML hub that provides access to pre-trained models that are customizable for individual use cases. LG AI is also planning to migrate EXAONE to Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes multiple FMs available via an API. This gives customers greater choice to test, privately customize, and deploy the model that works best for their specific use case.

About Amazon Web Services

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 102 Availability Zones within 32 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Canada, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About LG AI Research

Launched in December 2020 as the artificial intelligence (AI) research hub of South Korea's LG Group, LG AI Research aims to lead the next epoch of artificial intelligence (AI) to realize a promising future by providing optimal research environments and leveraging state-of-the-art AI technologies. And LG AI Research developed its large-scale AI, EXAONE, a 300 billion parametric multimodal AI model, in 2021. EXAONE, which stands for “Expert AI for Everyone,” is a multi-modal large-scale AI model that stands out from its peers due to its ability to process both language and visual data. With one of the world’s largest learning data capacities, LG AI Research aims to engineer better business decisions through its state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies and its continuous effort on fundamental AI research. For more information, visit https://www.lgresearch.ai/.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231129787735/en/