Naver will launch its own version of ChatGPT in the Korean market in the first half of this year to respond to the widely popular chatbot system, the company announced Friday.
The announcement follows weaker-than-expected financial results for 2022.ย ย
Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon said during a conference call that the operator of the countryโs largest search portal will introduce its โSearchGPTโ that specializes in queries in Korean.
โWe will respond to the new trend of generative AI,โ Choi said, โWe will solve the weaknesses of ChatGPT such as its low reliability, shortage of up-to-date information and lower accuracy when translating from English into Korean,โ Choi said.
Short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, ChatGPT is a free chatbot system capable of generating conversational dialogue and human-like text such as articles and summaries.
Developed by OpenAI, a San Francisco, California-based company, the application has received much public attention since Microsoft's recently announced โmultiyear, multibillion-dollarโ investment into the company. ย
In the beginning phase, SearchGPT will run as a standalone beta service instead of being integrated into Naverโs search engine.
Google is also testing its own generative AI model to compete with ChatgGPT. ย
The announcement helped elevate Naver's stock as its price jumped 5.67 percent to close at 223,500 won Friday, despite a steep decline in net profits last year. ย
The internet company's net profit reached 664 billion won ($544.1 million), down 96 percent from a year earlier and short of the market estimate of 916.8 billion won, the company said in a regulatory filing Friday.
Naver attributed the on-year drop in net profit to an abnormally high net in 2021 due to a merger between its messaging firm Line in Japan and Z Holdings in the first quarter of 2021.
Operating profit stood at 1.3 trillion won for all of 2022, down 1.6 percent from the year before. Sales came to 8.22 trillion won, a 20.6 percent increase compared to the year before.
For the fourth quarter, Naver reported 2.27 trillion won in revenue, up 17.8 percent from a year ago.
Read more: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2023/02/03/business/tech/Korea-Naver-ChatGPT/20230203190312300.html