Enterprise-ready AI: efficient LLMs and smarter document processing

This article was featured as the cover story in the first issue of KORUM 2025, a quarterly magazine published by the Korean-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Written by Minsoo Cho, Lead of Business Development at Upstage, the article explores how AI is transforming the future of work and how enterprises can leverage Upstage’s end-to-end AI solutions for smarter operations.

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In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, 2022 marked a pivotal moment with the emergence of ChatGPT, fundamentally reshaping how large language models (LLMs) tackle complex tasks. This technological leap has redefined efficiency and scalability in AI, opening new frontiers for enterprise innovation.

While LLMs promise unprecedented capabilities, they often come with significant barriers. Massive models demand extensive computational resources and high operational costs, creating a challenging entry point for many organizations. Upstage emerged as a solution to this complexity, offering a smarter, more accessible approach to AI deployment.

Founded in 2020 and backed by over $100 million in investments, Upstage has a clear mission: to build intelligent solutions that transform workplace productivity. The company's innovative approach centers on developing compact, high-performance AI models that deliver enterprise-grade capabilities without the traditional infrastructure overhead.

Upstage Solar - the most intelligent LLM on a single GPU

At the heart of Upstage's offering is Solar, its pre-trained LLM that challenges the "bigger is better" paradigm. Available in two sizes—Solar Mini (10.7 billion parameters) and Solar Pro (22 billion parameters)—the model demonstrates that computational efficiency can coexist with exceptional performance.

Solar Pro stands out for its exceptional multi-disciplinary language understanding and reasoning. It delivers intelligent, context-aware responses to complex queries and demonstrates human-like abilities in following intricate instructions.

Powered by Upstage’s proprietary Depth-Up Scaling (DUS) method and advanced data recipe, the 22B model is designed for single-GPU deployment. This optimization significantly reduces GPU infrastructure costs while maintaining high performance, offering enterprises a cost-efficient solution for high-impact AI applications without compromising capability.

Solar also excels in fine-tuning, making it an ideal base model for building domain-specific solutions. According to Predibase, a fine-tuning platform, Solar outperforms most open-source models in fine-tuning capabilities by a significant amount, delivering industry-leading results.

Accessibility is another key advantage. Solar is available via on-premises, APIs and cloud-based platforms like Amazon Bedrock Marketplace, Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, and AWS Marketplace. Customers can easily deploy and fine-tune Solar to meet their specific needs—without the need to build a model from scratch.

Let LLMs read your documents with speed and accuracy

Beyond language modeling, Upstage has introduced a sophisticated Document AI solution that redefines how enterprises handle unstructured information. Traditional document processing often overlooks critical contextual nuances, but Upstage takes a different approach.

Even the most advanced LLMs are prone to inaccuracies, or “AI hallucinations,” due to their probabilistic nature. To address this, the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method incorporates external databases—housing organizational documents like emails, presentations, reports, invoices, and receipts—to improve the accuracy and reliability of AI outputs. However, LLMs cannot directly process unstructured files; these must first be converted into structured, machine-readable data.

Upstage’s Document AI simplifies this process. By using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), it extracts all text from scanned documents and identifies key information. Its performance surpasses human accuracy, as evidenced by partnerships with industry leaders such as Samsung and Hanwha Life Insurance.

But documents often include more than just text—they feature tables, graphs, and contextual dependencies. Simple text extraction risks losing vital information, making accurate outcomes difficult to achieve.

To address these challenges, Upstage developed Document Parse (DP), a solution tailored to enterprise demands for speed, accuracy, and usability. DP delivers precise, reliable outputs from LLMs, even with complex documents. Its capabilities go beyond text and tables, transforming static visuals like charts into structured formats such as HTML—bridging the gap between human-readable visuals and machine-readable insights.

Empowering the future of work 

Already, hundreds of global companies are leveraging Upstage's solutions to develop custom generative AI applications. From education and healthcare to legal and financial sectors, Solar LLM demonstrates remarkable versatility in addressing unique organizational challenges.

Technology is ultimately a tool—its true impact lies in how you define your purpose and approach. Whether it's enhancing efficiency, tackling challenges, or reimagining workflows, Upstage is here to guide you in leading the way.

Discover how Upstage’s cutting-edge AI—Solar Pro, Solar Mini , and Document Parse—can transform your business. Contact us or request a demo today.