2023/09/19 | Sungmin Park

Upstage wins ‘AI Technology Award,’ the highest award given by the Minister of Science and ICT, at the 2023 AI Korea Awards Event!

What is the ‘2023 AI Korea Grand Prize’?

The ‘2023 AI Korea Grand Prize,’ co–hosted by Edaily and the Intelligent Information Industry Association, is an award ceremony held in collaboration with the Ministries of Science and ICT, trade, industry and energy, and SMEs and startups with the aim of discovering Korean AI companies that create future growth engines. This year marks the fourth iteration of the event.

The award categories include three ministerial awards and are as follows: The AI Technology Award (Ministry of Science and ICT Award); the AI Application Award (Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy Award); and the Manufacturing Intelligence Innovation Award (Ministry of SMEs and Startups Award). Additionally, there are three other categories: the Coexistence Award (Chairman of the Industry, Trade, and Small and Medium Venture Business Committee Award), the AI Innovation Award (President of the Intelligent Information Industry Association Award), and the Social Responsibility Award (Chairman of Edaily Award). These awards recognize companies or organizations that have successfully innovated their services, products, or production processes using AI, data analysis, and related technologies.

Winner of the AI Technology Award; Upstage’s Driving Force

Upstage was honored with this year's AI Technology Award (Minister of Science and ICT Award), rising above prominent competitors. According to Edaily, Upstage received such high praise from each of the seven judges, so much so that it was unanimously selected for the award. Professor Sang-Gu Lee of Seoul National University, also the chairman of the judging panel, explained Upstage’s selection: “We look forward to Upstage’s promising future growth. Upstage possesses numerous AI models such as Document AI and AskUp that have achieved excellent results in AI performance competitions, contributing to the application and integration of AI throughout businesses.” Upstage’s achievements have shown its potential, rising as an AI startup and attracting the attention of the world for its technology.

1. Document AI boasts global top technology

Last April, Upstage beat big global tech companies such as Amazon and NVIDIA in the 'ICDAR Robust Leading Competition', the world's most prestigious competition in the AI-OCR field, winning in 4 categories (HierText-1/2, VQAonBD, IHTR 1). Upstage swept the top rankings, displaying its expert global technology. OCR, Optical Character Recognition, is divided into 'detection technology', which locates letters in an image, and 'recognition technology', which identifies the letters. Upstage scored the highest in both categories, beating even big global tech companies.

These achievements were made possible by the new methodology used. While traditional detection technologies use significantly reduced word regions for training to prevent adjacent word regions from overlapping, the Upstage team developed a method that predicts word boxes by incorporating gaps between regions for training, leading to a minimal reduction in word regions and thereby significantly improving model performance.

Upstage's unique know-how accumulated through participation in various international competitions. Collaboration with actual companies has been applied to the advancement of the Upstage Document AI solution, helping companies digitally transform while looking to achieve greater innovation in the future.

2. Upstage LLM ‘SOLAR’ beats ChatGPT

Upstage focuses on domain specialization and optimization through its LLM model ‘SOLAR,’ Specialized and Optimized LLM and Applications with Reliability, and supplies Upstage SOLAR LLM, which is a program preventing information leaks of corporate data as well as hallucination phenomena. Upstage’s performance last August was recorded at 72.3 points in the 'Open LLM Leaderboard' hosted by Hugging Face—the world’s largest machine learning platform—and surpassed 3.5-GPT, the foundation for ChatGPT, taking first place and receiving significant recognition. Building on this model, ‘SOLAR’ was launched, becoming the first domestic model to be applied to the global generation AI utilization platform ‘Poe’ and signaling the startup’s global expansion.

Furthermore, Upstage has differentiated its competitive edge in the LLM industry through its various experiences, including establishing Korea’s first natural language understanding (NLU) evaluation dataset, ‘KLUE,’ and operating ‘AskUp,’ a leading domestic generative AI service that has surpassed 1.4 million users. By accumulating expertise in prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and technological assets, ‘Upstage SOLAR LLM,’ a private AI tailored for corporate clients, is expected to shine across diverse industries.

3. Performance and Research Outcomes in Top Global AI Academic Societies

A factor of Upstage’s technology that cannot be left out is the various achievements and research results proven by top global AI academic societies. Since its founding, Upstage has published more than 80 papers at international conferences, including ECCV, NAACL, CVPR, ICLR, ECCV, AAAI, NeurlPS, EMNLP, ACL, and RecSys. These papers include topics such as OCRs (7 papers), recommendation systems (12 papers), NLPs (47 papers), and data-related information (11 papers), highlighting Upstage’s extensive publication record and ongoing commitment to advancing and innovating AI research on a global scale.

Last June, Upstage presented 7 papers at ‘ICML 2023-DMLR,’ a prestigious event in data-centric AI, achieving the highest number of research outputs among domestic companies. Notable submissions included “DMOps: Data Management Operations and Recipes,” proposing processes for companies to effectively construct AI training data, and "Inter-Annotator Agreement in the Wild: Uncovering Its Emerging Roles and Considerations in Real-World Scenarios," which explored effective data collection through cost management and efficient construction. These achievements showcase Upstage's advancements in AI research and application within the global community.

In addition, Upstage is known for being Korea's first double-digit gold medalist in ‘Kaggle,’ the AI Olympics. Kaggle, owned by Google, hosts the world's most renowned online AI competition platform with a community of 11 million participants from over 200 countries. Through consistent participation, Upstage has explored technological research and discovered innovative methodologies, applying these findings to solve real-world business problems and create superior products.

Boasting Top Global Technology: Meet Upstage’s Products!

• Introduce business-domain specialized LLM

• Document AI essential for digital transformation

• AI education containing the know-how of AI specialized companies

Solve your concerns and accelerate business growth with Upstage AI!